I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I’m here.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

I became a Republican in 1951, the first year I could vote.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

It’s been my experience in politics that you can try and plan it out: ‚I’m going to hit the three ball which will hit the eight ball.‘ You’ve just got to go run and try to do everything right. And then have a little luck.

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

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

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

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 think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

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.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

I entered the health care debate in response to a statement in the United States press in summer 2009 which claimed the National Health Service in Great Britain would have killed me off, were I a British citizen. I felt compelled to make a statement to explain the error.

We don’t have to let extremists define us.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

Cooking today is a young man’s game, I don’t give a bollocks what anyone says.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Politics is applesauce.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

When I came to Johannesburg from the countryside, I knew nobody, but many strangers were very kind to me. I then was dragged into politics, and then, subsequently, I became a lawyer.

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.

I do have a political agenda. It’s to have as few regulations as possible.

There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour.

There is no gambling like politics.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

I kept a very full diary of my relationship with Nixon, for some strange reason, until he became president.

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won’t tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, ‚Well, you know: It’s secret.‘

The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.

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

I don’t really regard myself as a political figure.

I’m substantially concerned about the policy directions of the space agency. We have a situation in the U.S. where the White House and Congress are at odds over what the future direction should be. They’re sort of playing a game and NASA is the shuttlecock that they’re hitting back and forth.

This is pure speculation, but for a period of time, a lot of getting into a party was through fundraising and volunteer work, and Republican women had more time to do that than democratic women, who were out there getting jobs.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.

The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force.

I am what I am. A fighter.

I might talk about killing people, but that doesn’t mean I do it.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

The fact is that we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed in 1978 or ’79.

Bob Marley isn’t my name. I don’t even know my name yet.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other’s speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

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

The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.

There’s a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

There were the questions of what kind of First Lady I would be, what issues would I focus on. Those were the questions that were being pounded on me through the campaign. A lot of times, I wondered what in the world Barack was even getting us into.

I almost laughed about the Machiavellian plans of the presidents of the United States.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Trump just looks stupid trying to appeal to blacks and Latinos.

I feel Anglo-American.

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

Even people on the liberal side are starting to worry about going off a fiscal cliff.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.