Jim Gray Quotes

In the push and pull of Washington politics, Thom Tillis has decided there are things more important than representing North Carolina. He has put his own political interests, and serving the special interests, ahead of North Carolina's interests.

I'm hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure.

John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich.

My sense was that most of the elected officials in Washington - in their heart of hearts - really believe that the system can't be too bad because it produced them.

Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you're not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.

The way I see it, I'm not going to Washington to be the 60th Democratic senator. I'm going to Washington to be the second senator from the state of Minnesota.

My belief is the majority of people in politics are just interested in pursuing this career in politics, and doing what's necessary to get themselves re-elected. And if that happens to coincide with the public good, great. But if it doesn't, the public good loses out.

Every member of Congress deserves a seat at the table to be involved in the process. I will continue fighting for this to become a reality in Washington, and will be running for speaker of the House.

I don't want to go to Washington to be a co-sponsor of some bland little bill nobody cares about. I don't want to go to Washington to get my name on something that makes small change at the margin.

A politician cannot separate his own personal advantage from his own political advantage.

In Washington it is an honor to be disgraced.... You have to have been somebody to fall.

If you do get into the Senate, don't get the Presidential mania. It makes mad every man who is at all prominent at Washington either in the House or Senate. Scores of men, usually sound and sensible, fancy they can be President, who has no more right to think so than the autocrat of Russia. I have no knowledge of any tolerably conspicuous politician at Washington whose career is not colored and marred by his ambition to be President. I say this in all seriousness. It makes fools of all sorts from [Daniel] Webster and Lewis Campbell.

I’m always amused by politicians running against Washington, when they desperately want to get to Washington.

'Scandal' has always lived in this dark place with this idea that Washington is filled with this underbelly of monsters, that if the real world understood how dark, twisted and corrupt it really was, they would never agree with our government or want to be part of it. It's been kind of fun to live in that world. It felt like a fictional world.

When I think about Sen. Collins, I think she might have been different from the other people in Washington when she was first elected but I have to ask is that still the case.

After 30 years in Washington, it is clear that Mitch McConnell has lost touch with our state, its people, and our values.

Washington is deeply frustrating because so many of the positions that politicians hold are a product of ephemeral self-interest. They reverse themselves, for themselves, all the time.

If those people who come in to join the PSP, hoping to extract something from the party for themselves, I think even if they leave, I will not feel sorry.

Whenever people in Washington complain about spending cuts, they mean spending cuts that would affect defense contractors. They want to massively increase spending cuts everywhere else in the budget.

When you write fiction, there were things about Washington that I've experienced and wanted to write about, including the swamping nature of it, the compromises people come to town and are forced to make, and also, when writing about Joe McCarthy, the indecency and lies that he put forward that people didn't take a stand about.

With little fanfare, Jared Kushner is quietly tackling Washington's slow, outdated modus operandi while simultaneously engaging in high-level diplomacy that promotes America's interests on the world stage.

Members of Congress are less beasts of accumulating burden than computational machines designed to win re-election. Their sense of their own political interests is acute.

Governor Hogan's successes and support in Maryland, including with Democrats, prove that Marylanders like the change he's bringing to our state, and they will support a candidate like me who will bring that same real change to Washington.

What I don't like about Washington, if we say one syllable or one sentence, or this guy said something bad about me, then, all of a sudden, they have to be my mortal enemy. I don't think that's how it works in American business.

Too often, the elected individuals we put our public trust in disappoint us.