David Gergen Quotes

All governments are more or less corrupt.

Nixon officials foreshadowed both the historic distinction and seamy underside of the presidency.

I'm in politics. I'm in government, so nothing surprises me.

Politics is the most corrupt profession on Earth, no matter where you are.

As I watched some of the Watergate hearings I kept asking myself what all these people—[John] Dean and others—were doing there in the first place. Was there really an honest job that needed doing?

PUBLIC SERVANT: Persons chosen by the people to distribute the graft.

I refuse to stand by while our democracy is trampled by politicians more concerned about amassing power than helping the people who sent them to Washington in the first place.

According to Kim Jong-Il's biography, they say he has been constantly accused of dishonesty, drunkenness and sexual excess. So if he lived here, he could be in Congress.

We've seen a lot of dirty politics in Ireland.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I found that out when I was Attorney General in Massachusetts.

I think very poorly of United Russia. United Russia is the party of corruption, the party of crooks and thieves.

I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood.

Surveillance changes history. We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon.

I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.

We've seen the hubris. And now we're seeing the scandals.

There is a tendency in all parties, when they have been for a long time in possession of power, to augment it.

I would love to do an unauthorized biography about Congress... It's like a secret society up there.

He [Richard M. Nixon] told us he was going to take crime out of the streets. He did. He took it into the damn White House.

Washington is a cesspool of non-accountability.

I have the disease called politics.

There are seats in the Senate for sale.

This career [politics] of plundering and blundering.

There are no necessary evils in government. It's evils exist only in its abuses.

I would feel insulted if you called me a politician. Politicians here in Africa do not have a good reputation.

You roll back the stones and you find the slithering things of the world of Richard Nixon.