Runoffs, Re-Elections Quotes

For the sake of advantage which is to be gained from the public revenues and from office, men want to be always in office.

Is it not natural that a man who is a candidate for the favor of the people, and who is dependant on the suffrages of his fellow-citizens for the continuation of his public honors, should take care to inform himself of their dispositions and inclinations…? This dependant [creates] strong chords of sympathy between the Representative and the constituent.

The Republican senators are filibustering themselves out of their seats.

In American politics if you are perceived as not doing well on the economy, you get fired.

It is rotation in office that will perpetuate our liberty.

Experience concurs with reason in concluding that the first magistrate [President] will always be re-elected if the constitution permits it. He is then an officer for life.

Governments come and go, but civilizations linger on.

Many Senators are scared to death that the people back home are going to find out what they’ve been doing in Washington.

A politician’s instinct is for self-survival.

Every man who has been in office a few years believes he has a life estate in it.

The relation of the conservation of natural resources to the problems of National welfare and National efficiency had not yet dawned on the public mind. The reclamation of arid public lands in the West was still a matter for private enterprise alone; and our magnificent river system, with its superb possibilities for public usefulness, was dealt with by the National Government not as a unit, but as a disconnected series of pork-barrel problems, whose only real interest was in their effect on the re-election or defeat of a Congressman here and there—a theory which, I regret to say, still obtains.

I think that you are going to be badly defeated.

Briand, though not popular in the Chamber, and though his conduct of affairs is much criticized there, manages to keep himself in office, partly by his Parliamentary skill and his persuasive eloquence, and owing to the non-existence of a suitable successor, and no combination of parties constituting a majority in the Chamber being able to agree on the choice of substitute.