Ever since Gutenberg, every dynasty, every political leader, every major religion, has recognized that to control the media is to have a powerful instrument for controlling the values and behavior of a population.
The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
Both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have law degrees but they do not know what the rule of law means.
To say that the newspaper press represents public opinion is to administer insult to intelligent men. It is the property of speculators, political leaders, large contractors and railway directors.
Political leaders will never take risks unless the people push them to take risks.
The United States should not, in principle, object to the implementation of Islamic law or involvement of Islamic activists in government. Islamically oriented political actors and groups should be evaluated by the same criteria that are applied to any other potential leaders or opposition party.
Each side had its uninformed fanatics. And each side had political leaders who fanned the flames with their rhetoric.
Clinton's hands remain incredibly clean, don't they, and Tony Blair's smile remains as wide as ever. I view these guises with profound contempt.
Political prodigies are rare in a nation that grooms top leaders through decades of Communist Party road-testing and pageantry. And because Chairman Mao's cult of personality led the country into extremism, the Party spent the next three decades engineering its politicians to be as indistinguishable as possible.
I've been really privileged to work for two presidents - President Obama and President Clinton - who are both people of faith, who value faith, and who respect that others have the same feelings in their own lives.
You have to understand that to have a revolution when you are 18 years old is completely different from normal political leaders who were born in a democracy and will die in a democracy and never to have experienced that change. I have seen that change.
A man of extreme fickleness of principle and full of childish vanity
Political leaders are sucking blood of the people.
Remarkably, there are leaders in Washington who don't understand why it's so important for us to have a budget.
Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.
Our political leaders have great responsibilities, but as with many situations in life, people often rise or fall to meet your expectations. Our responsibility as citizens is to expect our leaders to lead and to give them enough support so that they may do so.
Obama's starting point was not as low as Manmohan Singh's starting point, and Obama's rise was not as sharp.
Political leaders in Belarus are routinely repressed, and their voices are muffled: Tsikhanouskaya was running for president because her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was arrested before he could start his own presidential campaign.
President Obama is highly concerned with education. He's a champion on early-childhood development strategies. So I like the work he's doing, and I support it, and I realise that he's one of very few political leaders around the world that actually has early-childhood development strategise at the top of his agenda.
I think there's a disconnect between political leaders and young voters around a lot of things related to the private sector. For example, a lot of politicians continue to attack big banks. While I'm not a defender of big banks, my sense is younger voters have had generally pretty good experiences with banks.
There have not been children of comparable youth in the White House since the Kennedy era.
Persistence in one opinion has never been considered a merit in political leaders.
I don't like it, to be honest, when politicians make a big thing of their religious beliefs, so I don't make a big thing of it.
We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves - with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.
In politics there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers, and then there are those like John McCain who use their careers to promote change.
