Stone Gossard Quotes

Even as economic and political freedoms have advanced enormously and generated huge benefits for humanity, they've also created a great deal of anxiety because every time you have to make a choice, there's anxiety about making the wrong one.

In politics you learn from the mistakes you made and the mistakes that you see other people make.

Successful and unsuccessful political policies have one commonalty. The people who created the policies thought they would be successful.

In politics, you have to balance these things: what is good for the country, what is available, and what is possible.

Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.

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

To govern is always to choose among disadvantages.

There's a presumption that somehow you calculate beforehand whether something is going to be good politically or not. I simply don't.

One of the things about politics, when you're actually there, you realize, you're on a high wire and there is no net under you. On any given day, your campaign can implode for something that happens inadvertently or even intentionally.

Because each are going to blame each other. The thing that Canberra has to really get right is the sharing of the resource. But my problem with people in the government who are there for a short time is that there's no consequences for some of these decisions they make.

When you're in politics sometimes you step on toes and they come back and kick you in the backside.

Most of the decisions you make are not black and white, but at the end of the day, you have to make the decision.

A statesman is judged by results. If his policy fails he goes. It may be unfair, but there is a kind of rough justice about it.

The last thing you want is to have to make a decision for political purposes.

Good intentions rarely make good policy.

To govern is to chose.

Policy making is not as easy as slurping down cabbage soup.

History is the unfolding of miscalculations

The longer political leaders shy away from the tough decisions, the greater the chance that there will be a lot more of them.

Being right too early is one of the most devastating things in politics

The truth is, politicians want to be reelected, and no European leader sill risk his or her future by overusing a policy that us costly in the short run but possibly beneficial in the long run.

Everything I did in politics affected somebody.

My experience in government is there is a whole host of unintended consequences you have to think through. I can't un-know that, I find it harder now to offer simple solutions.

Politics, as a profession, is not about making the right political decision. It's about making the right decision and then managing the political consequences.

In politics there's never a magic wand.