Political Error Quotes

The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.

The commonest error of politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.

In the last couple of years before Chairman Mao's death he said that the "Cultural Revolution" had been wrong on two counts: one was "overthrowing all", and the other was waging a "full-scale civil war". These two counts alone show that the "Cultural Revolution" cannot be called correct. Chairman Mao's mistake was a political mistake, and not a small one.

The mistake that was made was, of course, leaving Saddam in charge of affairs over there.

[Vietnam was] the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s going to prove to be one of the greatest blunders any American President has ever made.

I think that the decision to go to war in Iraq was a mistake.

I was critical of the Israeli government, however, for not being prepared for the move. One does not uproot thousands of people without planning in advance what will be done with them. This was a political and human error in which the government functioned poorly.

The one big strategic error - which was a political error and an economic error of grand proportions - was the prescription drug bill.

I'm not saying that George W. Bush did everything right. But even if you take a skeptical view of his Iraq war, [Barack] Obama made the more serious error of withdrawing his troops from Iraq early.

We may blunder on in spite of repeated miscalculations of the popular will

It [the Vietnam War] is worse than immoral. It's a mistake.

In 27 years of reporting from Washington, I've never heard a President admit he made a mistake.

Lacking the direct test of success or failure, the voter tends to turn, not to those politicians whose measures have the best chance of success, but to those with the ability to 'sell' their propaganda. Without grasping logical chains of deduction, the average voter will never be able to discover the error that the ruler makes.

Statesman only talk of fate when they have blundered

[George W.] Bush was led astray and we were led astray.

Only armchair politicians are immune from committing mistakes. Errors are inherent in political action.

Of course great politicians are always liable to be wrong about something, and the more people tell them they are wrong, the more stubbornly they defend their error.

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

Regrettably, what we are now seeing is that the new U.S. government with Donald trump is stuck in the same old, partisan thinking patterns in terms of our resistance. That is a mistake.

Necessity, especially in politics, often occasions false hopes, false reasonings, and a system of measures, correspondingly erroneous.

If I were to look at foreign policy, I would say John McCain has been wrong on just about everything over the last four decades.

I was dupedby the Secretary of the treasury [Alexander Hamilton], and made a fool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me; and of all the errors of my political life, this has occasioned the deepest regret.