Alexander Mackenzie Quotes

Emotion is a rotten base for politics.

I live in Realville, and my problem is that I'm governed by logic. And some of the claims that are made by people on the left just don't hold up.

Emotions are the curse of logic.

Logic will never change emotion or perception.

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

Philosophy is easier than politics.

Nothing is more fallacious than to expect to produce any valuable or permanent results in political projects by relying merely on the reason of men. Men are ... for the most part governed by the impulses of passion.

There is nothing that is not political.

… the politically engaged will tend also to be the most closed-minded.

A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it…. Along the same lines, people who aren't talented in a given area tend not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from co-workers to politicians. This may impede the democratic process, which relies on citizens having the capacity to identify and support the best candidate or policy.

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Politics is the art of realizing what there is to realize.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Politics and power is a realm of relative influence.

I think I can regard myself as a political decision-maker.

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

Logic has made me hated in the world.

When you look at our world, the truth is that we're all under the influence of politics.

Politics is the science of who gets what, when, and why.

Washington - having spent a lot of time there, I grew up there and have spent a lot of time there recently - is largely defined by detailed analytical views and policy choices that are not very good. You know, each policy choice has a winner and a loser, right? Somebody's ox is getting gored.

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.

But I'm not interested in politics. I lose interest the microsecond it ceases to be emotional, when something becomes a political movement. What I'm interested in is emotions.