Ed Gillespie Quotes

Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972.

The message is pretty clear: Americans are sick and tired of the doubletalk coming out of Washington, of us going home and saying we're conservative and then coming up here and voting for 10,000 earmarks. We can't fool America anymore; the media is too good. They're reporting what we're really doing.

In any operation as large as that of the federal government there are always going to be anomalies, mistakes and peccadilloes. The trick is to incite so much public (or at least media) outrage about them that the government has eventually to cut its losses rather than risk continued political damage.

I must be out of it, but I don't know any good journalists who have excused Clinton's problems.

This is a matter of public health. The public was sick and tired of DeLay and his corruption.

If I was the governor of New Jersey, the George Washington Bridge would not have been shut.

I've always tried to avoid politics because most politicians that I know are quite dirty in terms of human dignity, ethics and morals.

I think President Obama is trying to deceive the public in pretending that he was not a part of Congress that has made some decisions in the past that got us to where we are today.

Nixon was the beginning of people not trusting politics.

I'm not saying that all politicians are awful. I don't know any of them well enough to say whether they're awful or not. But almost every day, you find out something about them that's appalling. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised any longer.

I don't think that Washington is a fundamentally bad or corrupt place.

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

I decided there was nothing in Washington as important as one constituent, and I dropped everything when one called.

Oversight now is defined as going after political appointees.

... it's better to be in session than go home and face the voters.

It's hard to make corruption a partisan issue because voters are cynical about everybody in politics.

Theodore Roosevelt ... had become uneasy at the effect on the public of the periodical press's increasing criticisms and investigations of business and political abuses

The Capitol Building should have a sign saying, “Warning!! You are now Entering an Ethics-Free Zone!”

Perhaps our Congress will be Exalted on a high Gallows

Washington concentrates on the ends of government and not the means. But the people are so disgusted by the means, that that is what they now are worried about.

Why is there so much resistance among people who work in the Government to the seemingly obvious fact that, in our democracy, if the Government lies, it will eventually get caught

The public, by and large, trusts its leaders not only to tell the truth, but to get the job done. When they don’t get the job done, they get punished, and when they don’t get the job done and it comes out that they lied, they’re in really serious trouble. This is what happened to [Lyndon] Johnson and it’s what happened to [George W,] Bush. If you’re going to tell a lie, make sure the policy works out.

Politicians often refuse to talk about things on the grounds of national security. Most of the time it’s not national security; it’s national embarrassment.

I don't think that political history is full of a whole lot of tremendously honest people. I have never found any fault about that as far as Mr. Trump is concerned in my relationship with him.

That's what representative democracy is about, is members going to Washington but coming home and answering the tough questions.