Andrew Jackson Quotes

This is not politics. This is garbage. And we are disgusted by it. To those who are departed who sought in some, quote, clever, unquote way, to tarnish the reputation of Tom Foley, I say, good riddance.

Politicians have done some grim things in pursuit of the office. President Franklin Roosevelt was a philanderer; nevertheless, he pushed aides to use his opponent Wendell Wilkie's affairs to hurt him. He even tutored aides on how to spread rumors without getting caught.

Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.

When the wind is right, a faint odor of kerosene is exhaled from Senator McCarthy.

There's something very Nixonian about the idea of keeping an enemy's list.

I see it all the time in politics. If a candidate gets caught in a lie, he quickly tries to change the subject by throwing more mud at his opponent. The mud keeps flying until some of the slanderous material sticks.

Members walk into the chamber full of hatred. They believe the worst lies about the other side. Two senators stopped by my office just a few hours ago. Why? They had a plot to nail somebody on the other side. That's what Congress has come to.

Any man familiar with public life realizes the foul gossip which ripples just under the surface about almost every public man, and especially about every President

Sure those quotations were irrelevant, but we had one objective: to keep him [Sinclair] from becoming Governor. But because he was a good man, we were sorry we had to do it that way.

When they finally decided to do McCarthy in, Nixon was the fellow they selected, and he was perfectly willing to turn on his conservative friends and cut their throats….Nixon was a superb hatchet man.

If politicians throwing mud begin to slip in it, perhaps they will head for higher ground.

I don’t think that you have to run down someone’s reputation in order to run for the Presidency.

Reveal Richard Nixon … lay him and his motives bare … destroy him in his shot for the Presidency.

Criticism of the sexual rectitude of politicians first surfaced as a regular part of American public life in the acrimonious milieu of the 1780s and 1790s. During those transitional decades ... older notions of deference and reticence began to recede. In their place emerged a fierce brand of political combat that regarded personal morality as a legitimate field of battle.

On the road to the GOP nomination, Trump earned the reputation as a good debater by slandering and bullying his opponents, knocking them out with cheap shots and lies. On a crowded stage, Trump got away with these deplorable tactics.

One of the frustrations of the Republicans is that they have been mostly unsuccessful in equating the word Clinton with Mafia, which, to them, seems so head-smackingly obvious.

I understand that the nature of politics sometimes involves fending off frivolous, anonymous allegations.

The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people's secret virtues, but only about their secret vices. Accordingly most gossip is untrue, but care is taken not to verify it. Our neighbour's sins, like the consolations of religion, are so agreeable that we do not stop to scrutinise the evidence closely.

As we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from crank to demagogue. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

The Republican I ran against, at the end of the campaign, had decided that I was "a friend of terrorists" and "a friend of pedophiles." That's the kind of crap they came out with. I expect that's the kind of crap they'll come out with again.

Misrepresentation, false propaganda, innuendoes soon sprout into poisonous weeds, and before long the people find themselves victims of a pollution that has robbed them of their individual liberty and enslaved them to a group of political gangsters.

It often happens that those are the best people whose characters have been most injured by slanderers: as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been picking at.

Don't indulge in gossip. ... People who throw mudballs always manage to end up getting a little on themselves.

It felt, like, so far from - or far enough from the reality of things that we can enjoy it purely as entertainment. And now it feels a little bit too in alignment, honestly, but yeah - so we'll see how season five [House of Cards] goes over there.