Political Conversation Quotes

Brexit has given us the start of a conversation with people who perhaps haven't traditionally voted Conservative.

My appetite for public policy and changing it, and not only being a part of the conversation, but affecting it in a positive way, never diminished after 10 years in Congress.

I am not fond of speaking about politics because I don't have in my possession an army of 200,000 soldiers.

There has to be a reason and objective (to air strikes). What does it do to move the effort down the road for a political conversation?

I made the mistake of writing something very, very short about Obama for this website that I write fiction for, and my father told me never do that again. And he was right. I have nothing to add to a political conversation because it's not my area.

You know, because of my military background, I talk to voters who for the first two minutes think I'm a Republican.

I had a cup of tea with Michael Howard after my appointment shortly after I became Home Secretary, and without telling tales out of school, shortly after I became Home Secretary, and he said that when people used to ask him whether he enjoyed it he'd reply that "enjoy" wasn't quite the right description.

Everybody's talking about the President, we all chipped in for a bag of cement.

If anything is naive and lightweight, it's the traditional political conversation.

Spirituality in Washington can be more of a - I don't want to say it - but, a networking opportunity. Religion is often used opportunistically in the political conversation.

Would you phone the president of Ghana?

I guess it feels to me that the political argument that has been lost in my lifetime is taxation. How do you engage in that debate when people don't trust politicians at all? It is almost impossible to start a conversation about taxation.

If you are opposed to immigration or support strictly punitive immigration measures, you cannot even start a conversation about other issues with most Latino voters.

If you don't put the spiritual and religious dimension into our political conversation, you won't be asking the really big and important question. If you don't bring in values and religion, you'll be asking superficial questions. What is life all about? What is our relationship to God? These are the important questions. What is our obligation to one another and community? If we don't ask those questions, the residual questions that we're asking aren't as interesting.

Congress suffers a great deal of criticism for its partisan acrimony. But while we may disagree politically, and air our opposition in this chamber, it is the conversation behind the scenes that cements and defines our relationships.

Contrary to what everyone thinks, in my family, we didn't talk about politics at home.

Is the purpose of free elections to allow the most clever and vicious person to aggregate power, or is the purpose of free elections to enable the American people to have a serious conversation about their country's future and try to find both a policy and a personality that they think will carry to them that better future?

Politics is a conversation between the contestant and the voter.

We wanted to hear from viewers about why they watch or participate in call-ins on C-SPAN, ... Viewers of all ages and walks of life wrote to us, including actresses, stand-up comics, parents and students. What's clear after reading the entries is the impact that call-ins have had on the political conversation on the network.

Tonight was a great opportunity to take on the political status quo that has given us trillion dollar deficits and put millions out of work. Our objective was to inject some common sense into the conversation among Republicans at a time when business-as-usual simply won't work.

Before I ran for District Attorney, two Republicans invited my husband and me to lunch. And I knew a party-switch was exactly what they wanted. So, I told Chuck, we'll be polite, enjoy a free lunch and then say goodbye. But we talked about issues - they never used the words Republican, or Democrat, conservative or liberal. We talked about many issues, like welfare - is it a way of life, or a hand-up? Talked about the size of government - how much should it tax families and small businesses? And when we left that lunch, we got in the car and I looked over at Chuck and said, "I'll be damned, we're Republicans."

Women and people of color and young people especially are about to have this amazing opportunity to shift the political conversation in this country for the good of all of us, toward more progressive policies, and it's a really amazing and important time to be part of that.

A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.

There are two outstanding issues in democratic politics these days. One is the relationship with the media, which is now 24/7, and operates with a completely different intensity than even 15 or 20 years ago. How do we have a proper conversation between leaders and country when it's moderated sometimes in a very partisan and inflammatory way? And the second thing is the effectiveness of our democracy. How do we get the right gene and talent pool in politics?