Political Intrigue Quotes

Politics is such a torment that I would advise everyone I love not to mix with it.

Politics is a dirty business for a gentleman ...

George Bush looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul in the first meeting he had in Slovenia. And then in the next meeting, he realized his soul was very dark.

Talleyrand is a silk stocking filled with mud.

Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors - Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors' Plot of 1953.

You would not believe the amount of feedback I've gotten over people binge-watching The West Wing. Most of them have binge-watched it countless times.

I have no doubt that the Congress is active in manipulative politics.

Any man familiar with public life realizes the foul gossip which ripples just under the surface about almost every public man, and especially about every President

I really like 'Game of Thrones.

There's an old joke that politics is Hollywood for ugly people. An awful lot of the press coverage about Washington reads like coverage of Hollywood. Madonna is having some spat with Sean Penn. Who cares? And who cares which politician is mad at that politician?

I think six seasons are telling us one thing about 'Game of Thrones': Everyone should watch their back. No one is safe. That's what I love about the show. I love that it's so unpredictable.

'First Family' on the CW is about the president and his family living in the White House.

'The Secret Agent,' Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich - in fact, a scheme by a secret police agent to stir up a government backlash - has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age.

It had long been established in the Civil Worlds that public business was to be transparent, and personal business opaque; but it was as well recognised that the two would always have a turbulent interface, and that the clique, the caucus, and the conspiracy were as ineradicable features of civility as the council or the committee.

[Politics is a] war of all against all … a quest for power after power that ceaseth only in death.

I have been a practitioner of tough politics for many decades. There is little that amazes me and even less that shocks me.

Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.

Politics is a blood sport.

There's all kinds of crazy right-wing conspiracies about me.

Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy

If one shoots at a king, one must not miss.

It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d'etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.

The Ides of March? That doesn't worry me.

When you write fiction, there were things about Washington that I've experienced and wanted to write about, including the swamping nature of it, the compromises people come to town and are forced to make, and also, when writing about Joe McCarthy, the indecency and lies that he put forward that people didn't take a stand about.

I think there's been a tendency to place me in what has been characterised as the 'moral centre' of the film. In films like 'The Ice Storm' and 'The Crucible' and 'Nixon,' that's the sort of the persona that emerged.