Theodore H. White Quotes

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

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.

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

In the hard life of politics it is well known that no platform nor any program advanced by either major American party has any purpose beyond expressing emotion. Platforms are a ritual with a history of their own and, after being written, they are useful chiefly to scholars who dissect them as archeological political remains. The writing of a platform does indeed flatter many people, gives many pressure groups a chance to blow off steam in public, permits the leaders of such pressure groups to report back to their memberships of their valiant efforts to persuade. But in actual fact, all platforms are meaningless: the program of either party is what lies in the vision and conscience of the candidate the party chooses to lead it. Nevertheless,

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.