Political Realism Quotes

Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable, the art of the next best.

The prince must not mind incurring the scandal of those vices without which it would be difficult to save the state.

… realpolitik

Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.

You can't build politics on love. People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos.

I'm not sure if President Obama is an ideologue or a pragmatist. I am hoping and praying he's a pragmatist.

Politics is less than perfect because we are less than perfect. We therefore need to approach it with some modesty. Politics is not like mathematics, where clear premises and deductive reasoning can lead to exact answers.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Do not adopt the best system of government, but the one most likely to succeed.

There’s no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, than there was at the time of Genghis Khan.

To look for a continuation in harmony between a number of independent unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.

The logic of collective security is flawless, provided it can be made to work under the conditions prevailing on the international scene... The odds, however, are strongly against such a possibility.

Bush doesn't present himself as a realpolitik politician.

Self-interest is not only a legitimate but a fundamental cause for national policy—one which needs no cloak of hypocrisy.

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

No man can do both effective and decent work in public life unless he is a practical politician on the one hand, and a sturdy believer in Sunday-school politics on the other. He must always strive manfully for the best, and yet, like Abraham Lincoln, must often resign himself to accept the best possible.

The purification of politics is an iridescent dream. Government is force.... The Decalogue and the Golden Rule have no place in a political campaign. The commander who lost the battle through the activity of his moral nature would be the derision and jest of history.

It would be wrong for us to offer difference from the Conservative Party at the cost of credibility, but equally it would be wrong to offer credibility at the cost of being clear that there remain very fundamental differences.

Kennedy was like a rock star. Carter was the earnest outsider at the height of Washington cynicism. Clinton was a bad boy who proposed his 'third way' of Democratic politics, and Obama brought hope and change to a country that so desperately needed it.

Personal virtue is no substitute for political hard-headedness.

I thought at first I could be completely non-political. Then they told me I had to be part non-political and part political. I found that it was impossible, at least for me. I finally realized there was nothing for it but to be all-political.

Distrust of government isn't baseless cynicism. It's realism.

You're not trying to win 100 percent of the vote. You're after 50 percent plus one. It doesn't matter if you tick off the other 49 percent.

I would like to do a story where the country found itself a presidential candidate who actually will get elected preaching traditional values and then sets out to enforce them, where it actually comes down to the fact that reality as we know it may not be as etched in stone as we tell ourselves it is.

Politics is a matter of day-to-day improvisation, and it often seems as though the major parties are guided only by the desire to stay in office and not by any philosophy that might justify their doing so.