Naftali Bennett Quotes

Government functions best through many close relationships at the top.

If you talk to a lot of people in government, they will talk about the pathway to getting something done rather than the thing itself. And I just talk about material outcomes.

Legislative proposals are not merely vehicles for expressing policy, they are devices for getting policy decided.

The day-to-day making of policy is arguing all the time.

Common sense is not all that common in Washington DC.

He can't spend all his time running his mouth; he's got to run the country.

Ministers do not function well when they are unsure of their authority or of their standing with the Leader [ the Prime Minister]

[Describing Congress:] We generally lounge or squabble the greater part of the session, and crowd into a few days of the last of the term three or four times the business done during as many preceding months.

Polling can undermine the ability of officials to lay out, debate, analyze, and implement their plans. By turning to instant [electronic] polls we would eliminate the captain and the officers and leave every shipboard decision to the passengers.

If the President had his wife’s will and would use it rightly, our affairs would look much better.

... government by commission is a boon to all members of Congress, who cringe at facing no-win situations.... It gets the job done.

There's a can't-do attitude in this town [Washington DC] that I haven't seen anywhere else ... It's like running through a field of marshmallows in terms of getting anything done.

The War Office is a very slow office, an enormously expensive office, and one in which the Minister's intentions can be entirely negated by all his sub-departments, and those of each of the sub-departments by every other.

There is something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. The Government listen too much to the pollsters and the party managers. The trouble is that they are not even very good at politics, and they are entering too much into policy decisions. As a result, there is too much short-termism, too much reacting to events, and not enough shaping of events. We give the impression of being in office but not in power. Far too many important decisions are made for 36 hours' publicity.

What you always do before you make a decision is consult. The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted. Then, once a policy is determined, you call on them to help you sell it.

Politics is about explanations.

To some extent, it is [that] everybody is resistant to change. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody that was opposed to the smoking ban … All of Western Europe followed New York City. Many of the states around here did. Every major city, including in the tobacco-growing states in the United States, did. Brazil is smoke-free. Mexico City is smoke-free. All of France, Italy, Spain, England—they’re all smoke-free. It takes a while. Leadership is about doing what you think is right and then building a constituency behind it. It is not doing a poll and following from the back. If you want to criticize the political process—and it’s probably true throughout history, and certainly not just in the United States—I think it’s fair to say, in business or in government, an awful lot of leaders follow the polls.

That’s one difficulty about a democracy. Nothing ever gets decided—even after its been decided.

I look over a problem and decide what to do. No sooner have I sent out an instruction than it’s overridden by the White House or leaked to the press, or a call comes in from some Congressional staffer irately challenging what we are doing. In business, when we decided to do something, we did it. In government, nothing ever gets settled.

They [the Trump Administration] didn't roll out the travel regulations as well as they should have. Runing the government is a lot different from running a business where a CEO gives an order and it is implemented, but that doesn't happen in this town.

Tony Blair was a good politician but not a good Prime Minister, and that's what we don't want to be. We don't want to be just people who are good at winning elections: we want to be good at governing. I think we benefit from having seen the mistakes that we think Tony Blair made in 1997.

When a president doesn't know the policy, it doesn't make for a very effective leader.

As president, you can't just say, 'I want this,' or, 'Do that.' A president has to lead the American people to where he wants to go, and the chief of staff needs to help him get it done.

The intelligence community really is a vast bureaucratic entity, and it has been politicized in ways that are not effective for the gathering of intelligence and giving it to senior policymakers.

You have half a second to make your mind up to know if you're going to shoot, pass, drive. Don't hold the ball too long, and make your decision quick.