Quotes About American Politics

#1. The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems.

Eric Alterman

#2. As long as you remember that if you get involved in politics, you have to be very careful that your leader is for Allah. You don't get involved in politics because it's the American thing to do. You get involved in politics because politics are a weapon to use in the cause of Islam,

Siraj Wahhaj

#3. If it's a man's game so decidedly that a woman would be soiled by entering it, then there is something radically wrong with the American game of politics.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#4. To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

Charles Krauthammer

#5. The American political experience can therefore be viewed as optimism in the collective.

Michael J. Fox

#6. Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.

Zell Miller

#7. Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

Janet Flanner

#8. Money is power in American politics. It always has been.

William Greider

#9. In the U.S., some extraordinary movies have been made on politics and social issues. We learned lots of things from American cinema. But in the last ten or fifteen years, this has changed drastically. Today, that kind of movie is much easier to make in Europe.

Costa-Gavras

#10. Right now the best way that I can impact the world is through entertainment. One day, and that day will come, I can impact the world through politics. The great news is that I am American, therefore I can become President. But don't forget: I am G.I. Joe.

Dwayne Johnson

#11. I don't care what your politics are, I would wager that if you asked any American woman which administration would she have most liked to work for as social secretary, she would pick Jacqueline Kennedy's White House as the place to be.

Letitia Baldrige

#12. Who would want to buy a good car when you can buy an American car?

Bob Packwood

#13. Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.

John McCain

#14. I have real fears for Cuba based on the South American experience. Where you have had such a stern regime, as Fidel's [Castro], there is no culture of politics.

John Gimlette

#15. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#16. The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.

Neal Barnard

#17. [My son] Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives.

Cindy Sheehan

#18. Well, I think the great tragedy in American politics is what is legal, not what is illegal.

Jack Abramoff

#19. American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.

Noam Chomsky

#20. In the high-octane, low responsibility world of American politics it was better to be seen as crazy than weak.

Richard Peters

#21. American politics is always an open competition.

Hillary Clinton

#22. American influence in the world is certainly considerable, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Michael Mandelbaum

#23. When you're talking with a person at this level of the government, at the very highest level, I think you have to be very discreet because he, President Clinton, is very aware that anything he says publicly can have a profound impact on American politics and on world politics.

Lee H. Hamilton

#24. We've had periods of meanness in American politics. Actually, the dawn of partisan division in America was basically in George Washington's second term, when it was obvious that he would be the first and only consensus president.

William J. Clinton

#25. American labor will realize that its function is not to increase jobs, but to multiply the wealth and to expand the numbers benefited by the wealth at the swiftest possible rate.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#26. [Facism] that incredibly loaded word we do not associate with the real American politics is being used by other conservatives, by other Republicans to talk about Donald Trump.

Rachel Maddow

#27. Would anyone else like to say anything nice about women?

Ted Koppel

#28. The tax issue is the most powerful issue in American politics going back to the Tea Party.

Grover Norquist

#29. In American elections there are no losers, because whether or not our candidates win or lose, the next morning we wake up as Americans.

John F. Kerry

#30. We are an impatient culture and an impatient electorate.

Dick Couch

#31. If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.

Edna Ferber

#32. We must give the American worker the first option of ownership.

Jesse Jackson

#33. It is money, money, money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics.

Robert Byrd

#34. Why is it that there's more indignation over a photo of a prisoner with underwear on his head than over the video of a young American with no head at all?

Zell Miller

#35. American politics used to be an amateur sport. But somewhere along the way, we handed over to professionals all the things people used to do for free.

Bob Schieffer

#36. Scottish politics, U.K. politics, is not really like American politics in this respect. Not everybody is absolutely obsessed with image. I'm not saying the United States is obsessed with image.

Nicola Sturgeon

#37. I think Ralph Nader is the biggest liar in American politics when he said it didn't matter who was president.

James Carville

#38. Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics.

Michael Ignatieff

#39. When we talk about safety and security of the American people, politics falls aside pretty quickly.

Bill Frist

#40. The President is aware of what is going on. That is not to say that something is going on.

Ron Ziegler

#41. GRAPESHOT, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism.

Ambrose Bierce

#42. Communism has defeated itself everywhere except ... in American colleges.

Paul Harvey

#43. There is no more effective way to radicalize American Muslim youth than for political leaders to make public displays of prejudice against all Muslims. Suspicion will undermine their sense of identification with America and alienate some from both the culture and from politics.

Miroslav Volf

#44. American politics, like most things, is a story of what statisticians describe as the reversion to the mean.

David Ignatius

#45. I've been interested in American politics since I was eight. That was in 1968. It was an interesting year. I was a huge Eugene McCarthy supporter, so I guess he was the first senator I really knew about and cared about.

George Packer

#46. We must recognize that we can't solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power ... a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#47. George Clooney's 'Ides of March' could be the most under-appreciated movie of the year. In 20 years they're gonna go back and say, 'Oh, that was American politics in that time period.' I follow politics, I love it, and that movie is so authentic.

Harvey Weinstein

#48. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.

Michael Eric Dyson

#49. There was a widespread indignation in the American media. They were saying, 'How can you make a movie during an election that's about politics? What are you doing? Are you trying to influence people's lives?' To which my response was, 'Well, I hope so.'

John Sayles

#50. American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.

Henry A. Kissinger

#51. Because of my politics, people think I'm anti-American. But I was quite the reverse. What I don't like about the United States is when the government acts like an old, imperial 18th- or 19th-century European power.

Robert Wyatt

#52. As a newcomer to America who learned to 'speak American' by watching movies, I firmly believe that to change the politics of immigration and citizenship, we must change culture - the way we portray undocumented people like me and our role in society.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#53. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has taken American politics by storm.

Sean Hannity

#54. All that foreign oil controlling American soil.

Bob Dylan

#55. Politics is corrupting the American judicial system in much the same way the judicial system was corrupted in Nazi Germany.

Benjamin Carson

#56. The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.

Christopher Hitchens

#57. The cliche in American politics is that one week is an eternity.

Christopher Buckley

#58. [Mondale] was not born; he was appointed.

Ernest Hollings

#59. I have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics, and that is ready money.

Phil Gramm

#60. Dealing with pain for surviving on this thirsty concrete

Kjiva

#61. To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#62. Unfortunately, many talented people in Hollywood find their values and politics do not reflect the content they create, and many movie themes are in direct contrast with over half of today's American families.

Allen Covert

#63. Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.

Spiro T. Agnew

#64. The politics, policies, the President [Barack Obama] and the American people are all pointing in the right direction to fix our immigration system and pass legislation this year.

Luis Gutierrez

#65. Those who take the extreme positions in American political and economic life are always wrong.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#66. When you work in the White House you talk to the White House staff all day, so you're talking to the guy who handles the congressional liaison and the guy who's handling domestic politics and the guy who's handling the American economy and so forth.

Elliott Abrams

#67. I do not want to end up with an American style of politics, with us going out there beating our chest about our faith. Politics and religion - it is not that they do not have a lot in common, but if [religion] ends up being used in the political process, I think that is a bit unhealthy.

Tony Blair

#68. TRUST, n. In American politics, a large corporation composed in greater part of thrifty working men, widows of small means, orphans in the care of guardians and the courts, with many similar malefactors and public enemies.

Ambrose Bierce

#69. I will say that I think Israel enjoys strong bipartisan support in the United States. It's really above and beyond American politics.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#70. [T]he harm [Clinton AG] Reno did to American national security in the fight against terror was incalculable.

Dick Morris

#71. If you're in the penaut business you learn to think small.

Eugene McCarthy

#72. I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics.

John Updike

#73. Americans today confuse freedom with not being asked to sacrifice. The fact that you can't have everything you want exactly when you want it has somehow become un-American.

Bill Maher

#74. The polarization of Congress; the decline of civility; and the rise of attack politics in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early years of the new century are a blot on our political system and a disservice to the American people.

Edward Brooke

#75. The right to vote gives every eligible American a voice in our electoral politics. There's too much at stake to stay silent as this right is eroded.

Martin O'Malley

#76. I was once a statist, and then I researched The Holocaust. I am now a Libertarian.

A.E. Samaan

#77. The flag still stands for freedom and they can't take that away.

Lee Greenwood

#78. I guess probably in my time in politics, it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community, despite being subscription television's most valuable customers, they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options.

J. C. Watts

#79. First of all, let me just say what's interesting about American politics is that if things really get bad here, people say nasty things about you. From a global perspective, if politics get bad, you die, so let's just keep some perspective here.

Marco Rubio

#80. Because a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman, I realize that, like a good secondhand bookstore or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact.

Calvin Trillin

#81. I've always found that avoiding insanity is useful in life - which in American politics sometimes puts one in the minority.

Tony Blankley

#82. The surly orphan of American politics ... the grim joker in the deck, whose nightrider candidacy [is] a rough approximation of the potential for an American fascism. People

Hampton Sides

#83. The time has come to knock off this religion business in American politics. There's no end to the mischief that can occur. It is like putting nitroglycerine in a Waring blender.

Lowell P. Weicker Jr.

#84. With the single exception of the American Revolution, the aftermath of all revolutions from 1789 on only worsened the human condition.

Arnold Beichman

#85. The ACLU's record, far from showing a momentary wavering from impartiality, is replete with attemps to reform American society according to the wisdom of liberalism. The truth of the matters is that the ACLU has always been a highly politicized organization.

William Anthony Donohue

#86. My sense of American politics is that most of our politicians are for sale, whether they are out and out crooked, or simply beholden to corporate interests because they've taken so much money from their lobbyists.

Kam Williams

#87. In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections

Matt Taibbi

#88. Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics.

George Will

#89. A virtuoso performance. Scott Thompson's biography of the soldier statesman Fidel V. Ramos illustrates the fascinating and complex geography of Filipino politics and its relation with the American hegemon. It's first-rate scholarship and equally first-rate writing.

F. Sionil Jose

#90. I was an 18-year-old kid, and I was in the heart of things in Washington. My interest in American politics and, particularly, the Kennedys, began then.

Nigel Hamilton

#91. In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties.

Thomas E. Mann

#92. The major international appeal for 'House of Cards' was kind of a surprise because it's a very American show. What we learned is that American politics is very American, but greed and corruption and all of that is very global.

Ted Sarandos

#93. The real struggle between an American government and the people was one of power, which was settled when they designed their Constitution, which conceded the sovereignty of the people when it came to politics, and the sovereignty of the consumer when it came to economics.

Ndabaningi Sithole

#94. Not only does American corn syrup run deep in our food - it also runs deep in our propaganda.

Joshua Emmet

#95. My experience politically has always been that one-word definition of politics: money. Keep your eye on the buck. And that tells you where the American people are going to be.

Douglas Wilder

#96. Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison's work, Rampersad's text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life.

Michael Eric Dyson

#97. Our relationship with Israel is another reason we're being attacked. But an American politician - whether Muslim or not - who criticizes Israel as a martyrdom operation in American politics cannot survive as an official or as a politician.

Michael Scheuer

#98. Conspiracy theories abound in American politics. I don't think we need to be subliminable about the differences between our views on prescription drugs.

George W. Bush

#99. Don't you think that being a person of faith has become a third rail in American politics? If you want to run for president nowadays, you'd better get out there and say you're a very faith-based person.

Bill Maher

#100. There are times when American politics seems like little more than two groups in a fever to prevent each other from trespassing upon their respective soothing versions of unreality

Matt Taibbi