Political Culture Quotes

You know, what's interesting about Washington...It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second-nature.

When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could American intelligence continue to survive and succeed? That jury is still out.

A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.

We have exchanged the Washingtonian dignity for the Jeffersonian simplicity, which was in truth only another name for the Jacksonian vulgarity.

Election days were drinking days.

In the end the problem isn't that you have the wrong sort of government for the People, but that you have the wrong sort of People.

American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.

I don't feel that there is anything deep in the political culture that prevents "educating the masses." I'm old enough to recall vividly the high level of culture, general and political, among first-generation working people during the Great Depression. Workers' education was lively and effective, union-based - mostly the vigorous rising labor movement, reviving from the ashes of the 1920s. I've often seen independent and impressive initiatives in working-class and poor and deprived communities today.

History suggests that the main obstacles facing Muslims in their attempts to achieve open political systems and democratic governments are 1) a deeply rooted authoritarian political culture, and 2) manipulated interpretations of the Koran.

Some States just have a good political culture. It’s not all greed driven.

Even when we're not talking about Trump, we're talking about Trump.

I think we've lost the idea that politicians are part of the humanities. And we think of them as part of a natural science tradition, and we don't expect them to have the contact with literature, with history, with the richness of descriptive language that the humanities have always stood for. And I think that's a great loss.

I don't care about Donald Trump himself. I care and I worry about the very big base that supports him because this kind of language would have been absolutely nonexistent maybe 15, 20 - by the way, I follow the American elections, and I have never seen someone who is that offensive. I have seen people who are stupid. But stupid and offensive, that's new.

In England, unless I am mistaken, I think some of the politicians who love classical music and opera are a bit loath to be seen there in case people think it is elitist. That is a real shame because it also means we are not allowing our politicians a hinterland that an earlier generation, a Denis Healey, would have taken for granted.

The first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing.

King Louis Philippe once said to me that he attributed the great success of the British nation in political life to their talking politics after dinner.

While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing - good for our political culture.

Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion.

So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.

In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them.

I don't like politics, hypocrites, folks with poodles.

The culture and values of many former Soviet republics really do differ from what prevails in the West.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty.

American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it.