Election Year Politics Quotes

Learn this, all nice and decent people. An election year commence as soon as the first gunshot buss. ~ Marlon James

Talk is cheap, voting is free; take it to the polls... ~ Nanette L. Avery

Let's talk politics, to please Guy!"
"Sounds fine," said Mrs. Bowles. "I voted last election, same as everyone, and I laid it on the line
for President Noble. I think he's one of the nicest-looking men who ever became president."
"Oh, but the man they ran against him!"
"He wasn't much, was he? Kind of small and homely and he didn't shave too close or comb his
hair very well."
"What possessed the 'Outs' to run him? You just don't go running a little short man like that
against a tall man. Besides -he mumbled. Half the time I couldn't hear a word he said. And the
words I did hear I didn't understand!"
"Fat, too, and didn't dress to hide it. No wonder the landslide was for Winston Noble. Even their
names helped. Compare Winston Noble to Hubert Hoag for ten seconds and you can almost
figure the results. ~ Ray Bradbury

What is it like to be made vice-president?
On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world.
It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land....
It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself. ~ Austin Grossman

Politicians, after all, are not over a year behind public opinion. ~ Will Rogers

When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the moon will be at a given time; we know precisely how fast a spacecraft will enter or exist the earth's orbit. If we get the equations right, the rocket will land where it is supposed to--always. Human beings are more complex than that. A recovering drug addict does not behave as predictably as a rocket in orbit. We don't have a formula for persuading a sixteen-year-old not to drop out of school. But we do have a powerful tool: We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that. Our best hope for improving the human condition is to understand why we act the way we do and then plan accordingly. Programs, organizations, and systems work better when they get the incentives right. It is like rowing downstream. ~ Charles Wheelan

Four years in the White House and two presidential campaigns is an awful long time. In politics, every year in the White House is like dog years, six years off your life. ~ George Stephanopoulos

It's a presidential [election] year [2016], certainly everyone is talking about it, but if the history of the show tells us anything, the Big Brother cast does not usually discuss political issues like that in the house. ~ Allison Grodner

Bush's life is that a fundamentally decent man presided over a moment when politics got meaner and rougher. '88 was the year of the handler, of bringing in political consultants who played very hard and very tough'. ~ Evan Thomas

A year ago, you wanted to give up because we were losing, and now, you want to give up because we're winning. ~ Ann Althouse

That was the year the British decided to get out and sell everything. So I immediately held an election. I knew the people will be dead scared. And I won my bet big-time. The gullible fools! ~ Lee Kuan Yew

I know that some knowledgeable people fear that although we might be willing to spend a couple of billion dollars in 1958, because we still remember the humiliation of Sputnik last October, next year we will be so preoccupied by color television, or new-style cars, or the beginning of another national election, that we will be unwilling to pay another year's installment on our space conquest bill. For that to happen well, I'd just as soon we didn't start. ~ Hugh Latimer Dryden

I'm not driven to get back into politics. It's not on my top five things to do before I die, but saying that, I may be in politics in the next year or the next ten years. I've been on the front line for 12 years, four in state government, eight on the national level. ~ J. C. Watts

The Internet is a cauldron of anger every day, every year, election year or not, with unemployment at 10 percent or at two percent. It isn't exactly a good index of what's happening. ~ Charles Krauthammer

We American's are the example of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We vote Republican; again buying the line that they are deficit hawks and, when in power, they both feast on our blood and treasure and stuff their coffers with sweat literally from our brows.

Again, fed up, we elect Democrats and they repair what the Republicans purposely and yet strategically managed to do. Then, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes with renewed youth, the Republican deficit hawks emerge; spoon feeding us the same old bullshit until we bend to their will. We, in turn, vote them to power and, yet again, the ravenous lot feeds.

This year...this era, however, they're governing like Kamikaze pilots, not giving one bit of damn about either public opinion nor their place in government. I believe that they see the writing on the wall and, with much fervor, are seeking to grab everything they can get their greedy little hands on.

Will we ever get off this hamster wheel, my fellow Americans? ~ A.K. Kuykendall

I hate neutrality becouse is the worst thing that ever happened ~ Hamzatribah

California's 74-year-old Senator Barbara Boxer announced she will not run for re-election in 2016. When I saw the headline '74-Year-Old Boxer,' I assumed they were making another 'Rocky' movie. ~ Conan O'Brien

The American people are sick and tired of this 'lesser evil' garbage they get fed every election year. Both the Democrats and the Republicans do the same evils once they're in office. ~ Roseanne Barr

The year 1992 was the countdown year for the formation of the European single market, the regional economic entity - utopian for some, dystopian for others - now intended to recenter Europe in a global politics fragmented in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union....The year 1992 was also when the action adventure TV series Highlander first premiered - "the first European co-produced weekly hour to be sold into the US syndication market." ...My own pleasure in Highlander began with the principal actor Adrian Paul's eroticized image. I immediately (and somewhat idiosyncratically) "recognized" it as gay (the image, not necessarily the main story character Duncan MacLeod, or the actor Adrian Paul). It was in this "recognition" that I discovered my pleasure in the show. As a lesbian I was surprised: this was really the first TV show since my adolescence in which an eroticized male image seemed so powerfully attractive to me. Perhaps that is why I assumed it was somehow gay.... ~ Katie King

[Jerry Brown] is California's way of celebrating the Year of the Child. ~ Jimmy Carter

New Rule: America must stop bragging it's the greatest country on earth, and start acting like it. I know this is uncomfortable for the "faith over facts" crowd, but the greatness of a country can, to a large degree, be measured. Here are some numbers. Infant mortality rate: America ranks forty-eighth in the world. Overall health: seventy-second. Freedom of the press: forty-fourth. Literacy: fifty-fifth. Do you realize there are twelve-year old kids in this country who can't spell the name of the teacher they're having sex with?

America has done many great things. Making the New World democratic. The Marshall Plan. Curing polio. Beating Hitler. The deep-fried Twinkie. But what have we done for us lately? We're not the freest country. That would be Holland, where you can smoke hash in church and Janet Jackson's nipple is on their flag.

And sadly, we're no longer a country that can get things done. Not big things. Like building a tunnel under Boston, or running a war with competence. We had six years to fix the voting machines; couldn't get that done. The FBI is just now getting e-mail.

Prop 87 out here in California is about lessening our dependence on oil by using alternative fuels, and Bill Clinton comes on at the end of the ad and says, "If Brazil can do it, America can, too!" Since when did America have to buck itself up by saying we could catch up to Brazil? We invented the airplane and the lightbulb, they invented the bikini wax, and now ~ Bill Maher

What was the battle? What were the aims of the romantics? Why was the subject
the focus of such violent interest?
Hugo and his generation were all 'enfants du siècle', all, give or take a year or
two, born with the century. Brought up amidst the dramas of Napoleon's wars,
they had reached manhood to the anticlimax of peace and Bourbon rule. Restless
and dissatisfied, their dreams of military glory frustrated, they had turned them-
selves instead towards the liberation of the arts, their foes no longer the armies of
Europe but the tyrannies of classical tradition.

For thirty years, while the nation's energies had been absorbed in politics and
war, the arts had virtually stood still in France, frozen, through lack of challenge, in
the classical attitudes of the old régime. The violent emotions and experiences of
the Napoleonic era had done much to render them meaningless. 'Since the cam-
paign in Russia,' said a former officer to Stendhal, 'Iphigénie en Aulide no longer
seems such a good play.'

By the 1820s while the academic establishment, hiding its own sterility behind
the great names of the past, continued to denounce all change, the ice of clas-
sicism was beginning to crack. New influences were crowding in from abroad:
Chateaubriand, the 'enchanter', had cast his spell on the rising generation; the po-
etry of Lamartine, Hugo and Vigny heralded the spring ~ Linda Kelly

Every year the State will be the dog that chases its own tail ... engaging in a futile attempt to close a perpetual budget gap. ~ Richard J. Codey

The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament. ~ Richard Hofstadter

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two. ~ Mark Twain

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

At a press conference yesterday NASA announced that 2005 was the hottest year on record. It is so hot, and global warming is so bad, if the presidential election were held today, Al Gore would still lose. ~ Jay Leno

The Supreme Court dealt a huge blow, overturning a 100-year-old precedent that basically corporations couldn't give directly to political campaigns. And everyone is up in arms because they don't like it. The Federal Election Commission can't do anything about it. ~ Lois Lerner

The Hispanic population grew by 4.7 percent last year, while blacks expanded by 1.5 percent and whites by a paltry 0.3 percent. Hispanics cast 6 percent of the vote in 1990 and 12 percent in 2000. If their numbers expand at the current pace, they will be up to 18 percent in 2010 and 24 percent in 2020. With one-third of Hispanics voting Republican, they are the jump ball in American politics. As this vote goes, so goes the future. ~ Dick Morris

There is a substantial correlation between an election year and how the market finishes. ~ Louis Navellier

Whatever the long-term legal prospects for same-sex marriage, President Obama's willingness to put the matter front and center in an election year can at least make him a candidate for inclusion in Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. ~ Robert Dallek

Even though this is late in an election year, there is no way we can go forward except together and no way anybody can win except by serving the people's urgent needs. We cannot stand still or slip backwards. We must go forward now together. ~ Gerald R. Ford

I'll tell you the truth, even in an election year, and that's what people are ready for. ~ Tom Cotton

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a ~ John F. Kennedy

No wonder Americans hate politics when, year in and year out, they hear politicians make promises that won't come true because they don't even mean them - campaign fantasies that win elections but don't get nations moving again ~ William J. Clinton

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.'

'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position.

'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what ~ David J. Schow

In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back. ~ Eli Pariser

Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. ~ George Carlin

I would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets or appropriations bills, not to mention deal with tough challenges like the budget deficit, Social Security, and entitlement reforms. So many times I wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can't pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who've been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship? ~ Robert M. Gates

Where everyman is participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year but everyday, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte. ~ Thomas Jefferson

In the midterm elections, a 102-year-old woman voted for the first time in a U.S. election. Unfortunately, she voted for Woodrow Wilson. ~ Conan O'Brien

The mass hallucination of the twentieth century is this: that all these national governments, which each year kill or threaten way more humans than they protect, and take a big chunk of your income to do so, are for some reason a great idea, an inevitable force of fucking nature. ~ Tyler Mcmahon

Well, Judy, I would hope in the new year, we could start thinking about politics not like it was the Super Bowl, where you always have to have one team that wins and the other team has to be a loser. ~ John Breaux

Benjamin Netanyahu understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. ~ Thomas Friedman

I feel genuinely sorry for those who are so blinded by narrow partisanship that they cannot appreciate Limbaugh's energy, intelligence and satiric skill. They live in a box with bags over their heads. Though he and I hardly agree on politics (I voted for Ralph Nader last year and may go Green again in 2004), I respect Limbaugh as a political analyst and deft rhetorician who is a master of the microphone and who knows how to engage and challenge a vast audience. ~ Camille Paglia

Now in its third year in office, the Obama Administration has never championed the cause of human rights. Its slow reaction in June 2009 to the stealing of the election in Iran and the birth of the 'Green Movement' there, and its delay in backing the rebellions in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, are evidence of this problem. ~ Elliott Abrams

The politics of that year [2004] are old now, but the problem remains the same, the real culture clash of American life. It's between the essence of fundamentalism - paternalism, authority, and charity - and the messy imperatives of democracy, "the din of the vox populi" once derided by Abram Vereide. It's the difference between false unity, preached from above, and real solidarity, pledged between brothers and sisters - the kinds who are always bickering. ~ Jeff Sharlet

IT (The country) IS HEADED TOWARD OVERSIMPLIFICATION. YOU WANT TO SEE A PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE? TURN ON ANY TELEVISION ON ANY SUNDAY MORNING - FIND ONE OF THOSE HOLY ROLLERS: THAT'S HIM, THAT'S THE NEW MISTER PRESIDENT! AND DO YOU WANT TO SEE THE FUTURE OF ALL THOSE KIDS WHO ARE GOING TO FALL IN THE CRACKS OF THIS GREAT, BIG, SLOPPY SOCIETY OF OURS? I JUST MET HIM; HE'S A TALL, SKINNY, FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY NAMED "DICK." HE'S PRETTY SCARY. WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM IS NOT UNLIKE WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE TV EVANGELIST - OUR FUTURE PRESIDENT. WHAT'S WRONG WITH BOTH OF THEM IS THAT THEY'RE SO SURE THEY'RE RIGHT! THAT'S PRETTY SCARY - THE FUTURE, I THINK, IS PRETTY SCARY. ~ John Irving

Later that year, the Voting Rights Act opened the door for thousands to register for the first time. ~ Junius Williams

The Fed is on hold at least through the election but I think we'll get a little more tightening at the start of next year. I think, for the time being, we have a soft landing. But I think the reality is the stock market rally will probably add a little fuel to the economy and the tightening will return next year. ~ William C. Dudley