You can’t be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who’s for you and who’s against you.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

Real politics are the possession and distribution of power.

For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.

I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

It’s impossible, I think, however much I’d become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don’t think I’d ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.

I’m a singer, not a politician, and I think you don’t want the two to get confused. It’s not OK to be on CNN talking about people starving and then tell the interviewer that your new album is coming out in six months.

The Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That would require a commitment to economic issues, and that’s not their concern.

The 1928 Republican Convention opened with a prayer. If the Lord can see His way clear to bless the Republican Party the way it’s been carrying on, then the rest of us ought to get it without even asking.

I had three points I wanted to make: That not everybody in Hollywood is on the left, that Obama has broken a lot of the promises he made when he took office, and that the people should feel free to get rid of any politician who’s not doing a good job. But I didn’t make up my mind exactly what I was going to say until I said it.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

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

Man is not free unless government is limited.

In countries where innocent people are dying, the leaders are following their blood rather than their brains.

I’m highly political. I spend an awful lot of time in the U.S. trying to influence decision-makers. But I don’t feel in tune with British politics.

I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American.

I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Married or single, you sisters possess distinctive capabilities and special intuition you have received as gifts from God. We brethren cannot duplicate your unique influence.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

This may sound a little bit idealistic, but when I go to my blog, my Facebook page, my Twitter account, I talk to different people from all over the world, and you see how it’s easy to establish a dialogue.

Read my lips: no new taxes.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

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.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Vanity is but the surface.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

You do the policy, I’ll do the politics.

I am certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language… one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

We misjudge risk if we feel we have some control over it, even if it’s an illusory sense of control.

There are some members of the House leadership whose only mission in life is to demonize the president.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

I do not believe we will have a war with Iran.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re going to have to take what they get.

It was the Congress that imposed ‚Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,‘ it was certainly my position, my recommendation to get us out of an even worse outcome that could have occurred.