James Bryce Quotes

Anybody who deliberately tries to get himself elected to a public office is permanently disqualified from holding one.

Everybody must be removed [from public office] who has the mentality of the capitalist.

No one you'd really like to see in public office has the bad taste to run.

We only have politicians who are concerned with being reelected.

I've been able to see some very impressive people that are in politics, and I've been able to see a lot more people that are much less impressive that I don't know if I'd want to spend my life working with. When I see sort of how the sausage is made, it's not very pretty.

We have come to expect campaigns to be mean and stupid and politicians to be unresponsive, self-seeking and for sale to the highest bidder. We make jokes about our vice president, and all we ask of a president is that he be likeable. We seem to have given up on the Pentagon's corrupt use of our tax dollars.

Are my politics Democrat or Republican? I think both are horrific. And it doesn't matter anyway. Money runs America; money runs everywhere.

I believe both parties are sending the wrong kind of people to Washington, D.C.

I know the activists I deal with, we sort of try and check each other to make sure that we haven't gone native, that you come to Washington thinking it's a cesspool, you don't want to end up thinking it's really a hot tub and getting used to it. So that's something one has to keep an eye on all the time.

I'm fascinated by politicians, because I suspect the huge majority of them go into it full of ideas and for the best possible reasons but end up being hijacked.

Politicians have no politics.

No one has ever seen a congressman who left office because he didn't get paid enough. On the contrary, many of them spend millions of dollars to get there.... Congressmen do not make good hardship cases.

I entered Parliament with what I thought to be the lowest possible opinion of the average member. I came out with one still lower.

This system stinks and every senator who participates in it knows it stinks. And the American people are right when they mistrust this system, when what matters most in seeking public office is not integrity, not ability, not judgment, not reason, not responsibility, not experience, not intelligence, but money …. Money dominates the system. Money infuses the system. Money is the system.

Influence, power and money have invaded our political process …. If we leave it to the politicians, it is unlikely that anything will be done.

A Politian has an interesting anatomy. A politician has no heart, no guts, and has no backbone; and his head and his ass are interchangeable.

Money is the fuel that makes political victory possible. Sadly, folks, in many cases it's more important than ideas. And this is what turns off so many people to politics.

The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

Politics is the only field in which the more experience you have, the worse you get.

Neither liberal nor conservative politicians can resist the temptation to stand as mighty sequoias of rectitude amid the lowly underbrush of fundraising.

I believe people who go into politics want to do the right thing. And then they hit a big wall of re-election and the pettiness of politics. In the end, politics gets in the way of the business of people.

I ask you: turn a deaf ear to the special interests. Let politics stand down for a while. don't waste anytime thinking about future elections until we've done our jobs here.

The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.