Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

There was a stool there, and some fella kept asking me if I wanted to sit down. When I saw the stool sitting there, it gave me the idea. I’ll just put the stool out there and I’ll talk to Mr. Obama and ask him why he didn’t keep all of the promises he made to everybody.

I’ll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing.

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

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

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

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

My son Emilio is running for Congress to continue the fight for social justice.

By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.

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

Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.

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.

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

Republicans are men of narrow vision, who are afraid of the future.

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

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.

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

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

I don’t want to express my opinion about actual politics, because if I do, I have to be responsible for my decision.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

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

I don’t write policy for my government.

I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate; and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.

Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It’s minuscule, few percent.

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

We have to do more than just elect a new President if we truly want to change this country.

I am not a crook.

I think our politicians could learn a lot from Mandela.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America – there’s the United States of America.

America is just downright mean.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

There is probably a perverse pride in my administration… that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.

The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.

The Republican Party has become overwhelmingly so extreme that it’s hardly a traditional political party anymore.

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.‘

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

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.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‚Present‘ or ‚Not guilty.‘

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

In politics nothing is contemptible.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

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.

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

Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see that a reporter could do much to a president, do you?

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

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

In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.

Politics have no relation to morals.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.