Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

The Soviet government is the most realistic regime in the world – no ideals.

One lesson you better learn if you want to be in politics is that you never go out on a golf course and beat the President.

What is politics? Political system is equal to development politics plus political politics.

Governments are supposed to lie to their citizens.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it’s a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

I’m glad I’m not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone’s tape recording what you say.

I’ve grown accustomed to hotels and drastic climate change.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

If people wonder, yes, Hillary Clinton is my friend. She has been a friend to me and Barack and Malia and Sasha, and Bill and Chelsea have been embracing and supportive from the very day my husband took the oath of office.

I have a reputation for taking on governors a lot more powerful than me.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

Man is supposed to be the maker of his destiny. It is only partly true. He can make his destiny, only in so far as he is allowed by the Great Power.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet’s corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

I am not a crook.

People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I earned everything I’ve got.

Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It’s the other way around. They never vote for us.

Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.

Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Turkey must find its place if, of course, it can heal its internal sores, and none is more malignant than the perennial Kurdish issue.

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.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries.

If we depend for our happiness on another, on society or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them, and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

The idea that putting Americans ‚first‘ requires a withdrawal from the world is simply wrongheaded because a retreat would achieve exactly the opposite for our citizens.

A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.

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

One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent.

I don’t like to see a president who is just out campaigning all year long or for the last four years. I’d like to see somebody who’s going in the office. In fact, I’d like to not see them because that way you’d be sure that they’d be working.

The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

We Conservatives hate unemployment.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

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.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they’re good or there because they’re lucky.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

There is but one way for a president to deal with Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it is really going to work, the relationship has got to be almost incestuous.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.