Political Ascent Quotes

I became a prime minister within four-and-a-half years, the shortest kind of career ever in Israeli political history.

My father was not in power when I started my political career, or when I fought my first election in 1996. Starting like any ordinary person, I reached out to people everywhere.

Barack Obama's convention speech in 2004 had made him a political star, and he arrived in Iowa to crowds unseen in caucus history.

Everyone believed the Senate could not really be led. It used to take so long to rise up through seniority. In two years Lyndon Johnson is assistant leader of his party. In four years he is the leader of his party.

I literally went from the outhouse to the White House.

Richard Nixon is very much a self-made man in the six years prior to his emergence as a national figure. Between the moment he's elected to Congress in 1946 and the moment he's inaugurated as Vice President in 1953, he conducts nothing less than a kind of prodigy of American political self-advancement.

I have not yet met the politician who did not start to dream of the next highest office the minute that he was sworn in.

In a media instant, Sarah Palin went from an unknown moose hunter to a mass phenomenon on the precipice of becoming the vice president of the United States.

I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it.

I didn't get to the Senate by accident.

They [Democrats] are not just going up, they are accelerating on their way up.