Theodore H. White Quotes

#1. But if America falters in greatness and purpose, than Americans are nothing but the offscourings and hungry of other lands.

Theodore H. White

#2. In politics, the things that do not happen are frequently as significant as those that do.

Theodore H. White

#3. Politics is a process which should slowly bring to public all the private worries and hopes of the individual.

Theodore H. White

#4. The best politics for any president is to be a good president.

Theodore H. White

#5. All men who run for presidency of the United States are amateurs; there is no way of becoming a professional at it, and all of them, win or lose, are forever altered in spirit of character by the ordeal.

Theodore H. White

#6. To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see everyday, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.

Theodore H. White

#7. The 'smoke-filled room' as political reality is now as dead as Prohibition.

Theodore H. White

#8. The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.

Theodore H. White

#9. The first and most essential quality of a presidential candidate, as Averell Harriman once pointed out, is that he should lust for the job - he should want it more than all things, with a passion surpassing all emotion and probably even all principle.

Theodore H. White

#10. I have decided that I will test my ability ... in the fires of the primaries and not just in the smoke-filled rooms of Miami Beach.

Theodore H. White

#11. In the politics of consent, no victory is ever permanent unless the victor makes it firm on a base of persuasion.

Theodore H. White

#12. Professionals in a campaign are servants; they can tell him only how to do something once he tells them what it is he wants to do.

Theodore H. White

#13. Reading through the reviews, I feel as though I am witnessing a much more erudite and informed preview of the Fox News/MSNBC shouting matches of today.

Theodore H. White

#14. The Americans of the age were not an irreligious people; and the fact that they were Christian was very important, for the marks of Christianity lay all across the Constitution.

Theodore H. White

#15. Perhaps the book's greatest weakness is its romantic depiction of President Kennedy as a kind of knight in shining armor.

Theodore H. White

#16. Every American election summons the individual voter to weigh the past against the future.

Theodore H. White

#17. A genuine primary is a fight within the family of the party - and, like any family fight, is apt to be more bitter and leave more enduring wounds than battle with the November enemy.

Theodore H. White

#18. Liberalism: for every complicated problem there exists both an intellectual and a moral solution and they coincide.

Theodore H. White