Shifting Allegiances Quotes

Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.

On most significant issues and public debates, politicians have some friends, allies and supporters with whom they wish they had never been involved. These are the friends who do the work of your enemies. As you evolve your positions, many of your friends and enemies change places.

At Rome I love Tibur; then, like a weathercock, at Tibur Rome.

The bedfellows politics made are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship.

Inconstancy no sin will prove If we consider that we love But the same beauty in another face, Like the same body in another place.

Today's terrorist is tomorrow's friend. We were the ones that worked with Saddam Hussein. The United States worked with bin Laden.

What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.

Nothing is stable in the realm of power, and even closest of friends can be transformed into the worst of enemies.

My second husband believed I had such a fickle attitude to friendship that each Friday he would update the list of my 'Top Ten' friends in the manner of a Top Of The Pops chart countdown.

Power changes everything till it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains.

These people that started here, they support the government now against those rebels. Why talking about what happened at the very beginning is completely different from what is happening now - it's not the same. There's very high dynamic, things are changing on daily basis. It's a completely different image. Those people who wanted revolution, they are cooperating with us.

In my father's time - he was in college during many transitions in the late 1930s - they had great institutional loyalties... to his college, eventually the navy, the Democratic Party and certain ideals of our country. Those are the things that became broken with my generation.

If it's easy to be friendly she will be. If the wind blows the other way her friendship will be gone. And I'm thinking the wind is blowing the other way. She has found some other way to be an important person in her own right by hating others.

FICKLENESS, n. The iterated satiety of an enterprising affection.