Political Transitions Quotes

The fact that a TV star can become president should be old news since [Ronald] Reagan, and old news since the Nixon-Kennedy debates - which the famous story, whether or not you agree, is that if you listened on the radio, Nixon won; if you listened on TV, Kennedy won.

Great nations of the world are moving toward democracy.

The world has witnessed the rise and fall of monarchy, the rise and fall of dictatorship, the rise and fall of feudalism, the rise and fall of communism, and the rise of democracy; and now we are witnessing the fall of democracy... the theme of the evolution of life continues, sweeping away with it all that does not blossom into perfection.

All administrations benefit from the in and outers.

Governments come and go, but civilizations linger on.

I am a soldier and I worked for the kaiser, under Ebert, Hindenburg, and Hitler, all the same way, for the past 44 years.

Presidents come and go, and even parties come to and away from power. But the main policy tack does not change.

If we talk about changes of power in Russia, that has occurred several times in the past century. After Stalin came Khrushchev, who implemented his legacy quite radically, one could say. But there was no blood, nonetheless. After Brezhnev came Gorbachev. I'm not talking about the ones who were in power for only a short period of time. Gorbachev, too, left a very radical legacy.

It is a truth universally unacknowledged at Westminster that there is life after politics.

Now the masses of Latin America are electing governments they feel can take forward the democratic reforms of the last 20 years, and transform them into social and economic reforms. This is, I think, extremely important, because it also means that the left has abandoned the revolutionary solution proposed by Che Guevara and has taken the democratic path.

As you get older you start to see these events and leaders, and movements of the pendulum swinging back.

In the Philippines, Gloria Arroyo is the daughter of Diosdado Macapagal - but his term ended in 1965, and she was elected in 2001. Hardly a hand-off.