Political Instincts Quotes

Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls - before the public even knows to call them 'issues' at all.

I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct, nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.

My finely honed political instincts tell me that almost nobody believes that they should be paying higher taxes.

I've been described as a grizzled political veteran.

Having studied politics doesn't necessarily give you political nous.

[Donald] Trump is winning because people that vote Republican have been let down and disappointed one too many times, and their instinct is being borne out here. The Republican Party is not interested in winning.

What we need and have not got at Westminster are real experience and wisdom, possessed by people who do not view politics as a career.

You can't be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who's for you and who's against you.

Happens I am very political. I have deep political instincts.

Herbert Hoover was a man of genuine, fine character, but he lacked practical political sense. And he couldn't bend and shift and change with the requirements of the time. And he was a ruined President, because he was such a, I think, stiff-backed ideologue. And I think that speaks volumes about his character.

Politics at bottom is not all that complicated. It's all about timing.

The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.

Wellington Webb was one of the most significant mayors of the latter half of the 20th century. His natural political instincts are almost unrivaled.

Franklin Roosevelt didn't poll, because he had great political instincts. Now we have polls; we don't need instincts. But is that a change in principle? Is it a change in principle that we use a Xerox instead of carbon paper? It's of the same order of magnitude.

It raises questions about the natural instincts of Clinton that, when confronted with a serious domestic political scandal, she tries to blame the Russians, blame the Chinese, et cetera.

We have to acknowledge that Donald Trump knows our country better than we do. I think he figured out that anger and frankly fear were way more powerful than appealing to people’s better angels. That anger and fear were going to work in this election, whether you’re afraid of immigrants or afraid of people who are trans, he figured that out. And I think we all thought everyone’s better angels would prevail. Turns out the better angels went on vacation when Donald Trump came down the escalator and they haven’t returned.

Hillary Clinton has no instinct.

I thought Donald Trump once again just missed a whole bunch of opportunities to bury Hillary Clinton, and he missed them because he's not a politician, and he's not instinctively oriented toward the ideological explanations that undergird Hillary's policies.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.