Populist Quotes

#1. Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.

Christopher Hitchens

#2. Washington's Alfalfa Club dinner is a populist's nightmare.

Tina Brown

#3. Americans continue to suffer from a notoriously short attention span. They get mad as hell with reasonable frequency, but quickly return to their families and sitcoms. Meanwhile, the corporate lobbies stay right where they are, outlasting all the populist hysteria.

Eric Alterman

#4. Principled antipluralism and the commitment to "direct representation" explain another feature of populist politics

Jan-Werner Muller

#5. If you can't be a populist in Arkansas, you ain't going to be a populist in Washington.

Jim Hightower

#6. Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

Brian Eno

#7. As with fascism, the rise of Islamic totalitarianism has partly to do with its populist appeal to the class resentments of an economically oppressed population and to anger at political subordination and humiliation.

Ellen Willis

#8. In these troubled times we live in, we should remain vigilant and see through populist arguments.

King Albert II

#9. The populist mode of democracy is a politics of arousal more than of reason, but also a politics of diversion from serious concerns that need settling in either a liberal democratic or a civic republican manner.

Bernard Crick

#10. My personal political convictions are rooted in the populist political traditions of western Canada.

Preston Manning

#11. As morally troubling and politically charged as the issue of inequality has become, it's not likely to cause a populist revolt. Most Americans still have a generally positive view of the wealthy and, rightly or wrongly, believe they too can make it to Richistan someday.

Robert Frank

#12. I'm vulgar, I'm a populist. But isn't that what the mayor should be?

Jeffrey Archer

#13. Hamilton's besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.

Ron Chernow

#14. America is always a good target for a populist. In many countries, particularly authoritarian systems, if you want to get an extra bonus, you bash the Americans.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#15. I've never really considered myself just a street artist. I consider myself a populist.

Shepard Fairey

#16. The forces that have worked hard to stoke populist anger against reform are the very ones that benefit from a health system which puts profits ahead of quality care for its patients.

Jerrold Nadler

#17. To put it most simply, the evangelical ethos is activistic, populist, pragmatic, and utilitarian. It allows little space for broader or deeper intellectual effort because it is dominated by the urgencies of the moment.

Mark A. Noll

#18. Simply because something is a populist movement doesn't make it either good or bad.

P. J. O'Rourke

#19. I don't read the reviews because they're too horrible and the reviewers have not been big supporters of mine over the years, probably because I make these big populist movies and they hate it.

Rob Cohen

#20. These various remedies, eugenic, educational, ethical, populist and socialist, all assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress towards such an ideal. I think [democracy] is a false ideal.

Walter Lippmann

#21. Rock and roll, as I see it, is the ultimate populist art form, democracy in action, because it's true: anybody can do it.

Lester Bangs

#22. Like the Britain of Beaverbrook and Kipling, Japan in the early twentieth century was a jingoistic nation, subduing weaker countries with the help of populist politicians and sensationalist journalism.

Pankaj Mishra

#23. There is absolutely no point in not being a populist. What I feel emboldened to do is to take something which is a minority interest and make it accessible without dumbing it down. I'm such an enthusiast for peculiar things, things that are perhaps a bit avant-garde, and try and involve everyone.

Lee Hall

#24. When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

Hannah Arendt

#25. I come from a working class community in eastern Scotland, and I've always been a populist, though not a patronising populist.

Brian Cox

#26. I think there's a far more general audience now because I've done more populist stuff on telly.

Jo Brand

#27. A populist is someone who fights for common sense economic policies that sustain and expand the middle class.

Bruce Braley

#28. All previous populist movements were demanding things from governments, whereas the Tea Party is saying, 'Give us less, go away.' That's heartening to see.

P. J. O'Rourke

#29. Beating up on the so-called elite media has a nice populist ring to it.

Bill Keller

#30. The club is not a business. It's a populist democracy.

Simon Kuper

#31. English plus Microsoft equals a new cultural revolution a global means of communication that is irrepressibly contagious, adaptable, populist and subversive.

Robert McCrum

#32. The one man more responsible for destroying the Democratic centrist revival, for throwing away the Clinton legacy, and for suicidally pitching his party to the populist left was Al Gore

Andrew Sullivan

#33. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in 'Veep.' She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play 'Veep' would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn't one.

Rob Sheffield

#34. In practice, American modernizers tended to be distrustful of populist politics and inclined to favor elite-led societies; often they turned to modernization as a means of counterinsurgency and social control.

Fredrik Logevall

#35. Evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been pragmatic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectual.

Mark A. Noll

#36. Class warfare or soaking the so-called rich may make for good populist demagoguery and serve the political ends of the governing masterminds, but it does nothing to solve the grave realities of the federal government's insatiable appetite for spending and its inability to reform itself.

Mark R. Levin

#37. The cable news channels have cleverly seized on the creed of objectivity and redefined it in populist terms. They attack news based on verifiable fact for its liberal bias, for, in essence, failing to be objective, and promise a return to "genuine" objectivity.

Chris Hedges

#38. Bill Clinton sitting on Air Force One getting his hair cut while people around the country cooled their heels and waited for him, became a metaphor for a populist president who had gotten drunk with the perks of his own power and was sort of, you know, not sensitive to what people wanted.

Dee Dee Myers

#39. It's easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

David Brooks

#40. I won't dispute that bankers' privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.

Timothy Noah

#41. The Republican Party, right now, is a conservative populist party.

Mara Liasson

#42. I like to think that I'm a populist entertainer, but I'm a little bit idiosyncratic, and sometimes the networks wouldn't really roll with that.

Joss Whedon

#43. Extremists and populist movements are exploiting people's fear of those who are not like us. We can see the consequences in the form of terrorism and racially motivated violence.

Kjell Magne Bondevik

#44. I'm anti-big power. I don't know if that's populist or not.

Brian Lamb

#45. There is an understandable aversion to risk, and a reluctance to plan too far ahead: the modern electorate wants instant gratification and simplistic, populist solutions.

Mungo MacCallum

#46. The Populist Caucus aims to bring people together around middle class issues, so we can tolerate a little difference of opinion.

Bruce Braley

#47. I am hopelessly divided between the dark and the good, the rebel and the saint, the sex maniac and the monk, the poet and the priest, the demagogue and the populist. Pen to paper, I've put it all down, every bit from the heart.
I'm going out on a limb here, so watch my back.

Billy Idol

#48. there are kings and there are kingmakers. Regardless of what populist history might argue, you rarely have one without the other.

Matthew FitzSimmons

#49. There's something in life that's cool, it's relatively cheap, and fun, and populist. Even when it's elitist.

Stephen Malkmus

#50. Well, I think the Republican Party is the more populist party.

Ed Gillespie

#51. How, then, did Virginia gentlemen persuade the voters to return the right kind of people to the House of Burgesses? How could patricians win in populist politics? The question can lead us again to the paradox which has underlain our story, the union of freedom and slavery in Virginia and America.

Edmund S. Morgan

#52. There are so many shoot-'em-up, action, jingoistic TV shows and movies that are made every year. I think the final line is that Hollywood is populist.

Adam McKay

#53. Jean-Marie Le Pen is a holocaust denier who was convicted and fined for dismissing Nazi concentration camps as a, quote, "Detail in History." But he kept running this anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, populist unapologetic xenophobic far right party in French politics.

Rachel Maddow

#54. It's innate in me to be a Democrat - a true Southern populist kind of Democrat. There's not a lot of those anymore. I'm not saying I'm right or wrong. That's just the way I feel.

Tim McGraw

#55. The most revered presidents - Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama - have each advanced populist imperialism while gradually increasing inclusion of other groups beyond the core of descendants of old settlers into the ruling mythology.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#56. Musicians always want to sacrifice our creativity to get involved in environmental issues or political activism of some sort - to reduce it to something more populist in terms of sing-alongs or guitar songs with a message.

Eyvind Kang

#57. Static puppets, I wanted them to move, they're looking out the windows, but we didn't have time to rig those. I have more ideas than I can execute also every time that I do anything. I put the puppets in because people love 'em. I'm a populist in that sense.

Wayne White

#58. For me the insurrectionary possibilities of disaster are what make them really interesting and sometimes positive - Mexico City's big 1985 earthquake brought a lot of positive, populist, anti-institutional social change.

Rebecca Solnit

#59. The crisis of the 1930s and the populist reactions of that time must not be forgotten.

King Albert II

#60. Obama supporters pretended that his 2008 campaign was some sort of populist uprising even as Wall Street overwhelmingly supported his candidacy.

Glenn Greenwald

#61. (John F.) Kennedy was an elitist and not a populist. He was enthralled by a certain British aristocratic view of politics in which an enlightened ruling class makes reasoned, rational decisions that are in the interest of the more emotional and easily manipulated masses.

Scott Farris

#62. The lesson is that voters in both parties are in a very anti-establishment, populist mood. Hillary Clinton is the establishment candidate.

Mara Liasson

#63. Limbaugh can rightly be said to be the greatest populist expositor of conservatism in America since Reagan, and the link between the Reagan generation and the so-called Rush Babies.

Ben Shapiro

#64. The Populist Caucus is the only caucus in Congress devoted solely to addressing middle class economic issues. We formed the caucus because the founding members felt like there wasn't enough focus on middle class issues in Washington, and we're going to keep it focused on middle class issues.

Bruce Braley

#65. You see in times of crisis that extremist forces, populist forces, have a better ground to oversimplify things and to manipulate feelings. Feelings of fear.

Jose Manuel Barroso

#66. I think it's always hard for people to get their head around the fact that populist, commercial films can also actually be great works of art.

Helen Mirren

#67. Pundits talk about 'populist rage' as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class.

Elizabeth Warren

#68. If we say leaders are incompetent, we are going to fuel extremist, populist, xenophobic and ultra-nationalist parties.

Jose Manuel Barroso

#69. If I had chosen the populist course, it would have been a breach of the trust placed in me by the people.

Narendra Modi

#70. I don't know if I'm a populist artist, but I do try to maintain a spirit of generosity.

Fred Tomaselli

#71. If we put our trust in the common sense of common men and 'with malice toward none and charity for all' go forward on the great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail.

Henry A. Wallace

#72. Populists have never had a good press in Freedom's land.

Gore Vidal