Errol Morris Quotes

There was only one punch. Tony Blair rang me and he said 'Are you OK?' and I said 'Yes', and he said 'Well, what happened?' and I said 'I was just carrying out your orders. You told us to connect with the electorate, so I did.

I suppose politicians have always wanted to get re-elected, but there's a kind of a feeling now that if you just discredit your opposition, it makes it easier for you to win. I don't think that's necessarily true.

Campaigns are not for educating. They're for linking up with the public mood.

Anybody who says negative commercials are wrong and shouldn't be used doesn't know anything about politics. The fact is people respond to those commercials.

The world of messaging is the world of campaign consultants, of politicians, who are like trained seals who are given their message and then they perform. I’m not into that.

It's hurting Democrats if you do really go profoundly negative in the primary. Most of them don't. They actually realize the most effective use of their money is to make sure they stand out in front of the voters and the voters understand their story.

The infamous political ads like Carly Fiorina's 'Demon Sheep' and Christine O'Donnell's 'I Am Not a Witch' are so confusing, it's almost like they were paid for by Democrats.

One of the most overused phrases in political commentary is that someone is running a 'negative' campaign filled with 'attack' ads.

The most effective way to beat Hillary Clinton is to remind voters of Hillary Clinton's behavior.

Christine O'Donnell released a commercial in which she says, 'I'm not a witch.' That's pretty good, though not as effective as her opponent's slogan, 'I'm not Christine O'Donnell.'

Just a few months ago in the Republican primary Mitt Romney said to his opponents, who he was crushing at the time, stop whining. And I think that's a good message for the Romney campaign. Instead of whining about what the Obama campaign is saying, why don't you just put the facts out there and let people decide rather than trying to hide them.

Downplaying their faults is pretty much the point of campaigns. But we do count on them living with the constant terror of public rejection.

There is literally no such thing as an idea that cannot be expressed well and articulately to today's voters in 30 seconds.

In political advertising, truth only has an advantage when a credible source makes it known.

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.

The trouble [with modern political campaigns] is that the technicians of the media and the professional campaign advisors believe that the negative commercials and the attack work better.

If you can’t run against a political candidate, run against his campaign manager.

It's not a smear, if you please, if you point out the record of your opponent.

It [television] has locked candidates into ridiculous positions because only ridiculous positions can be compacted into 30-second commercials.

A 30 second negative ad can matter more to a candidate's career than a lifetime voting record.

Political advertising works, particularly when it’s unrebutted.

The 1934 Republican response to the Upton Sinclair campaign for California Governor marked a stunning advance in the art of public relations, in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor. In another twenty years, these techniques would spread East, achieve a new refinement, and begin to dominate the politics of the nation.

This cassette (video cassette of Walt Disney's Dumbo) was a documentary of my campaign.

… the most famous ad produced in the history of political television

In a national campaign you are driven to negativism.