Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

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.

You and I are stuck with the necessity of taking the worst of two evils or none at all. So-I’m taking the immature Democrat as the best of the two. Nixon is impossible.

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

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

Some people have a difficult time facing truth and reality. They prefer to live in a make-believe world, pretending that certain things aren’t happening.

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

Certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman president, perhaps sooner than you think. A woman can and should be able to do any political job that a man can do.

Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert.

Politics have no relation to morals.

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

I really don’t like women who try to be men. All these politicians, I think they’re horrendous. We could have a brilliant future, but we have this terrible male vision of destroying everything. They’d better sort themselves out and become more womanly.

France has more need of me than I have need of France.

The government of Israel doesn’t like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world.

Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don’t get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were.

I think our democracy has it exactly right: two terms, eight years. It’s enough. Because it’s important to have one foot in reality when you have access to this kind of power.

The President’s post should not be politicised. Once a president is elected, he is above politics.

The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.

Free government is the most difficult of all government. But it is everlastingly true that the plain people will make fewer mistakes than any other group of men, no matter how powerful.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

Before I went to jail, I was active in politics as a member of South Africa’s leading organization – and I was generally busy from 7 A.M. until midnight. I never had time to sit and think.

The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal they have to live off each other, while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats.

Fidel Castro, whatever people may think of him, is a hero in Latin America, primarily because he stood up to the United States.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

In politics nothing is contemptible.

With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.

I will never retire from politics, the revolution, or the ideas I have.

I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.

The presidency has many problems, but boredom is the least of them.

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

A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.

The universities are available only to those who share my revolutionary beliefs.

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

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

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

I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.

Americans… still believe in an America where anything’s possible – they just don’t think their leaders do.

Governments are supposed to lie to their citizens.

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

People were asleep, but I think they’re waking up now. Trump has given everybody a good kick, and people are waking up and realizing they’ve got to get involved.

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

The issues that cross a president’s desk are never easy. The easy questions don’t even get to the president.

The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.

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.

I will not run for president. No, nope, not going to do it.

The truth of the matter is that Iran is a cancer.