Ellen Glasgow Quotes

Politics is a dirty business for a gentleman ...

In politics nothing is contemptible.

I never desire to know anything of the detail of political measures, lest even those which I think best should lose anything of their intrinsic value to me, by seeing what low, paltry, personal motives and base machinery and dirty hands have helped to bring them about.

We've seen a lot of dirty politics in Ireland. We know from the French, their wonderfully neurotic presidents, that our hands are sort of tied. The Italians - I don't know where it stops. No nation can claim "We are an uncorrupt nation, therefore we will tell you what the morals of democracy are." Because it's going on everywhere.

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

We've seen a lot of dirty politics in Ireland.

This is a matter of public health. The public was sick and tired of DeLay and his corruption.

There is this concept of politics as a dirty game.

I'm not going to reduce the choices of Canadians at the ballot box by backroom deals or secret arrangements. I think that's a cause for cynicism more than anything else.

I think the record shows that as Speaker, I have taken the lead in cleaning up politics.

I did not resign from politics because of Bofors. I resigned because I do not know how to play petty politics. I did not know back then and I don't know now either.

Unfortunately, in American politics there are no standards for shame.

Honest Graft

Sooner or later you have to reach down into that old pork barrel.

Some statesmen go to Congress and some go to jail. It is the same thing, after all.

... he [Thomas E. Dewey] is a political streetwalker accosting men with "come home with me dear.

It seems that in the world of politics, lying is not such a big deal.

My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth there's hardly any difference.

There is nothing more frightening to a political satirist than an honest administration.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises?

You can't adopt politics as a profession and remain honest.

Politics is so corrupt that even the dishonest people get fucked.

I don't think that political history is full of a whole lot of tremendously honest people. I have never found any fault about that as far as Mr. Trump is concerned in my relationship with him.

Politics is noble; it is one of the highest forms of charity, as Paul VI used to say. We sully it when we mix it with business. The relationship between the Church and political power can also be corrupted if common good is not the only converging point.

I don't believe Spiro Agnew is a crook. If he was a crook, he'd still be in office.