A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.

I have considered voting Conservative because I am so against the Labour party.

I think Canadians are more interested in international events than Americans because it is such a small country, so politics affect it more.

I’m personally a moderate and a registered independent, so I’m not strongly Democratic or strongly Republican.

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

No party has a monopoly on wisdom. No democracy works without compromise. But when Governor Romney and his allies in Congress tell us we can somehow lower our deficit by spending trillions more on new tax breaks for the wealthy – well, you do the math. I refuse to go along with that. And as long as I’m President, I never will.

It’s nice to say let’s be bipartisan. But we’re a partisan nation. We were raised as a partisan nation.

If I studied all my life, I couldn’t think up half the number of funny things passed in one session of congress.

We need an adult in the White House. When making life-or-death, war-or-peace decisions, a president can’t just pop off or lash out irrationally.

Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that either the Democratic or Republican party has produced at least since I’ve been around. He’s fresh, he’s new, he’s insightful.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

It is true that the king has made a truce with the duke of Burgundy for fifteen days and that the duke is to turn over the city of Paris at the end of fifteen days. Yet you should not marvel if I do not enter that city so quickly.

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don’t think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths.

It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

It is a fine game to play – the game of politics – and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.

Any lady who is first lady likes being first lady. I don’t care what they say, they like it.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.

You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

I think, in politics, half the people are gonna like you, and half the people are not gonna like you, no matter what you do or what you say… It’s like there are no right answers. If there were, everyone would choose the right answers. They’re all opinions.

There’s no doubt that usually a president’s public image is enhanced by going to war. That never did appeal to me.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.

Politicians love regulating. That’s part of the whole power structure.

Politics is the most important of the civil activities and has its own field of action, which is not that of religion.

A gaffe in Washington is someone telling the truth, and telling the truth has never hurt me.

I can die a happy man never having been president of the United States of America. But it doesn’t mean I won’t run.

Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.

Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.

I just use fashion as an excuse to talk about politics. Because I’m a fashion designer, it gives me a voice, which is really good.

Nixon is one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

The trouble with Nixon is that he’s a serious politics junkie. He’s totally hooked and like any other junkie, he’s a bummer to have around, especially as President.

We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.

I would not vote for the mayor. It’s not just because he didn’t invite me to dinner, but because on my way into town from the airport there were such enormous potholes.

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

Obama’s not Jesus. He can’t walk on water.

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

One of the peculiarities of Delhi is that the term ‚reform‘ is associated only with passing of laws in Parliament. In fact, the most important reforms are those needed, without new laws, at various level of the government, in work practices and procedures.

I don’t usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this ‚hopey changey stuff,‘ she was right: there was nothing there.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

To me, ideology is corrupt; it’s a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you’re an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you’re religious, there’s a mystery left there.

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

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

Putin sought to destabilize Ukraine’s economy.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

So people are talking about revolution. What a revolution it would be to have a woman president.

When I came to Delhi and noticed an insider view, I felt what it was, and I was surprised to see it. It seemed as if dozens of separate governments are running at the same time in one main government. It appeared that everyone has its own fiefdom.

There’s no way now for you to get a Democratic or Republican nomination without being able to raise $200 or $300 million or more. I would not be inclined to do that, and I would not be capable of doing it.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

Politics is like football; if you see daylight, go through the hole.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

I don’t like politicians, and I don’t like politics. I definitely don’t want to be associated with any of them.

I’m the only president you’ve got.

I just didn’t want to get out there anymore; I didn’t want to get back into what I call ‚the swamp.‘ And the other reason why is I don’t think it’s good for the presidency for a former president to be opining about his successor. President Obama’s got plenty of critics – and I’m just not gonna be one.