Anthony Trollope Quotes

Opinion elites begin to shape a debate.

The essence of American politics consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism.

Party is organized opinion.

Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike.

Men and not measures are, no doubt, the very life of politics. But then it is not the fashion to say so in public places.

Everything is politics.

I've got a bit of an independent streak. I'm not afraid of bipartisan compromise on issues that are important to the nation.

My chief weapon is public opinion: The Spaniards, incapable of directing it, have prohibited its use; but now they are experiencing its force and importance.

As for life within a Legislature,— who can tell how warped and bent and twisted, and accommodated to the exigencies of party struggle become the faculties of belief?

Party divisions, whether on the whole operating for good or evil, are things inseparable from free government.

Politics begins when you have two people in a room or when you have one person looking in a mirror.

Policy and politics are always mixed up.

Governments almost never act with moral clarity and for very good reason. They are dealing with competing interests.

It's hard to mobilize various interest groups ... when its for the benefit of everyone.

Too many people in this town think about politics when they make every decision.

That is what politics is really about—reality and not image.

The world is governed by opinions.

The presence in society of different, sometimes opposing political convictions and discordant interests generates political struggle which is waged by both legitimate and morally justified methods and methods sometimes contradicting the norms of public law and Christian and natural morality

Nothing is more fallacious than to expect to produce any valuable or permanent results in political projects by relying merely on the reason of men. Men are ... for the most part governed by the impulses of passion.

… the enforcement of public opinion depends on our appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of others; and this appreciation is founded on our sympathy, which it can hardly be doubted was originally developed through natural selection as one of the most important elements of the social instincts.

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

I never desire to know anything of the detail of political measures, lest even those which I think best should lose anything of their intrinsic value to me, by seeing what low, paltry, personal motives and base machinery and dirty hands have helped to bring them about.

The agents that move politicks are the popular passions, and those are ever ... under the command of the disturbers of society.

For about 20 years we have had practically no collective leadership; there flourished the cult of the individual which was [earlier] condemned first by Marx and then by Lenin

Political Necessity!!!