Michael Beschloss Quotes

Punditry is like weather forecasting: the winds can shift without warning. I remember when nobody would bet a McDonald's Quarter Pounder that Bill Clinton would win the White House.

The pollsters and pundits will keep trying to read voters' minds.

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

I've been watching politics for 35 or 40 years and you just never know. You can have one person win the Iowa caucus and then the whole picture changes ten minutes later. The same thing can happen again after New Hampshire. I have no idea what's going to happen with our country in the future.

Politics is not an exact science.

I don't think we'll win every election.

Politics are not an exact science.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

Of all sciences there is none where first appearances are more deceitful than in politics

At a time when politics has become an almost minute-by-minute spectacle, political thinkers who try to discern a sweeping interpretive pattern in current events or to predict where those events may be heading are likely to find their work evaluated in terms dismayingly like those applied to candidates and strategists. One wrong guess, or an abrupt change in the political weather, can make even an illuminating political book seem as irrelevant as a bungled campaign.

If there is a constant to the American campaign story, it is that elites can’t predict the future very well. News is what surprises us, which is why the political press always has news. Voters are always undoing our certainties.

Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties

National polls basically always misinterpret the final outcome or mis-predict the final outcome.

The polls tell us something, but they don't tell us everything. They don't tell us how people are going to show up on Election Day.

Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of his world

There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

… the science of government is an experimental science, and that, like all other experimental sciences, it is generally in a state of progression. No man is so obstinate an admirer of the old times as to deny that medicine, surgery, botany, chemistry, engineering, navigation, are better understood now than in any former age. We conceive that it is the same with political science

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.

… experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does occur!

I hold them [politics] to be subject to laws as fixed as matter itself, and to be as fit a subject for the application of the highest intellectual power.

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion

The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they are going to turn out.

Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated

History is a dubious guide to current politics.

The individual in physical science is nothing; in human science everything.