Jake Sullivan Quotes

Try to remember that decisions are made by individual, fallible personalities, not gods. It's hard. I know.

Government is not an exact science.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

You have to spend your political capital on great causes for your country.

Every policy is shaped by two forces: background analysis and foreground politics. The political forces are loud, self-serving and, in the case of energy policy, well known.

In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them.

Politics doesn't matter, policy does.

What matters is not a simple sense of an issue’s salience, but whether a government can shape outcomes on it, where there is the greatest likelihood that the parties will actually be able to implement their policies.

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

Politics, you will observe, is the science of guessing right.

Politics is who gets what, when, how.

Whenever you involve scientists with politicians there is a struggle.

The careful study of the past enlarges our foresight in contemporary affairs and affords to citizens and to monarchs lessons of incitement or warning in the ordering of public policy

We have no strategy. It is the government that sets the strategy. All we can do it try and figure out what the government will do.

If generations past could get things so badly wrong, then we are forever vulnerable as well.

What I love to do is the policy. The politics, I'm brand-new at.

Science can tell us what can be done in principle, but it is then a matter for public debate as to what should be done. And ultimately, it is a role for politicians to decide the answers.

Governing involves choosing and making choices between competing goods.

Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.

The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted.

Human foresight often leaves its proudest possessor only a choice of evils.

What counts in the end is what the government does.

I mean my life was a combination of fascination with other people, with politics, and with policy, and the impact of government decisions on people's lives and the life of our nation and the life of the world.

I'm a big believer that good policy is good politics. And so, when it comes to making decisions on policy issues, what I endeavor to do is simply speak the truth.