Political Reality Quotes

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them.

If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.

Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism - the belief that the individual exists to serve others - is translated into political reality.

The Democrats have responded to the Republicans' lack of dealing with reality by truly not dealing with reality, either.

... the inherent conflict and disconnect between campaigning (promising people all that they can have) and governing (explaining to people why they won’t get it).

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors.

All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency.

One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists.

Every politician - FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama - they're all conservative by nature. They are part of the big thing and they're moving in a very constrained world.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

Political courage reads well in editorials, but it doesn't translate into political reality.

All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumble and begin to poke around for rumors of another Messiah.

It is a democratic fallacy to believe that people want to govern themselves. People only ask to be governed decently.

Don't fall in love with the map. The map doesn't win elections.

I'm more inclined to say the presidency has changed Trump rather than Trump changed the presidency. He has moderated or reversed himself on most of the positions he took as a candidate. Reality has set in, as it does with every new president.

We're in a kind of vicious cycle where the media tell the politicians, and the politicians tell the people, that perception is reality, and the perception of saving dooms a politician. I don't believe perception is reality, or that all Americans think that.

A politician’s task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible accord with the ideal and the principled.

In political matters it is very hard for a man in office to be purer than his neighbours, — and, when he is so, he becomes troublesome.

The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.

It's as if inside the White House the belief in Obama's inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it's a startling revelation.

No President is going to say, “I am not going to preempt.” This is simply a reality.