Kofi Annan Quotes

It's so much easier to throw rocks than it is to govern.

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

I'm not a professional politician, I'm a problem solver.

Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.

I believe in friendly compromise. I said over in the Senate hearings that truth is the glue that holds government together. Compromise is the oil that makes governments go.

The important thing is that we recognize our President's leadership, that he is not saying: I am going to walk away from this. He is saying: I am going to do the right thing.

The world cannot be governed without juggling.

Bipartisanship is nice, but it cannot be a substitute for action, not having it cannot prevent us from going forward.

The art of politics is knowing what to do next.

As a member of Congress, I'm often reminded that in baseball, as in diplomacy, you have to know when to hit, when to run, and when to show grace.

If the political will is there, we can solve anything.

If you look through history, all of the great work we've done in Congress has been around a table of compromise, when it comes to the most difficult problems.

Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning.

Without political will, nothing moves forward.

When you are President you have to get something done, and that often means compromise.

The art of government is the art of negotiating and compromise.

Compromises may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.

I remember thinking that there was no problem that we [government] couldn't resolve.

I don't know how you can govern without ever compromising.

Every one of us in Congress has a responsibility to keep working together and stay focused on what matters.

In politics there's never a magic wand.

What Lincoln did is he gathered people around him the way that I believe President Obama is doing by calling Republicans, talking to them, trying to work with them. And when that happens, big things get solved.

Three people marooned on a desert island would soon reinvent politics.

The issues are by some geometric number - 100 or 200 or 500 - times more complicated today than we appreciated them to be when Franklin Roosevelt was around.

When men organize themselves into groups, and they make rules based on common or self-interest, it's always tangled and political.