Kevin Spacey Quotes

In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme.

Many senators have developed a canny sense of what will play best for the audience.

Does Obama create confusion on purpose?

If you tell the truth you get into trouble, and that's why politicians are extremely dull.

The Democrats just don't have a foreign policy that they're willing to defend, that they're willing to use to take down the president's. We're dealing with the power of suggestion here.

A summit is a photo opportunity featuring two or more heads of government who have no business to transact, but believe a set of smiley photos will do them a lot of good politically.

Politicians are ambitious not to make important decisions but to say important things.

Politicians often confuse what sounds good with what really works.

Sometimes heads of state have to make statements for [local] public consumption.

At these big set-piece events like the leaders' debates, that exterior of calm and serenity is nothing compared to what's going on inside most of the time.

This Republican Kevin McCarthy makes Hillary [Clinton] the victim.

[In a political contest,] the first guy who defines the other, wins

The “cant” of the politician, like the cant of the “religious” man, is also protean in its guise, but its chief method is to explain away words. The politician can always show you that he didn’t mean what he says, but something rather different from what he says. Political cant consists in pretending to agreement with hearers, whoever they may be. This cant is part of the stock-in-trade of every politician, be he Tory, Whig, or Radical, and it is by its means that he tries to haul in stray votes.

I have no more obligation to spin. When you’re in the White House, you spin.

The politician has to try to appeal to everybody. So, consequently, he cannot tell the truth, because if he tells the truth over there, then these people over here will be offended.

As the age of television progresses, the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

It’s not only what you do in politics. It’s what you appear to do.

If you have short term political problems, you behave in a short term way.

Politics abhors a rhetorical vacuum. If the president is not clear on his … strategy, foreign policy critics and political opponents will be happy to define it for him, using less than flattering language.

A politician wants to come off as a happy warrior. To be contemplative seems almost effete, fancy – dispiriting somehow to much of your audience. He [Barack Obama] is not afraid to be this way at all.

If you’re going to be in national politics you have to maintain a thick skin.

The Republican National Convention was a rage-athon featuring a parade of hemorrhoidal has-beens.

I wish the American public wasn't so stupid if they realized that half the people on television make a living just to insult the other party.

Nobody understood how to use television for his own purposes better than Nixon, despite his poor showing against John F. Kennedy in the televised presidential debate.

Of course the Liberal Democrats are going to say things to try and get attention - but I don't think the country is paying much attention.