Political Misjudgment Quotes

Many pundits today are in the habit of misquoting Santayana's epigram, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Maybe some people have come to grief this way, but they are probably fewer than those who have fallen into the opposite error. One is apt to perish in politics from too much memory, Tocqueville wrote somewhere, with equal truth and greater insight.

The remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of al the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939

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

Barack Obama seemed to think he could win over his enemies. He certainly seemed to believe too much in his own powers of persuasion. One thing's for sure - he misunderstood the nature of his adversaries.

I think politicians sometimes badly underestimate the true feelings that Americans have for the land.

Ms. Rice was a bad national security adviser and a bad secretary of state. She was on the wrong side of some of the administration's biggest internal policy fights. She had a tendency to flip-flop when it came to the president's core priorities, and her political misjudgment more than once cost Mr. Bush dearly.

I had a lot of hubris going into politics, but I didn't think I was Pierre Trudeau.

We look at individuals who would vote for Donald Trump as if... we kind of undervalue them. And we underestimated them.

Most tragic mistake in history occurred when the United States joined the U.N.

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.

My colleagues across the aisle in Brooklyn and team Clinton are very smart people. I respect them very much. But they misread America. They, they did not have her in red states. They, they were pretending that they were going to turn red blue.