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Politics, politicians

Wednesday 21st of January 2026

Identity politics But in identity politics, equality  refers to groups, not individuals, and demands action to redress disparate outcomes among groups — in other words, equity,  which often amounts to new forms of discrimination. George Packer, The Atlantic, July/August 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Identity politics Fifteen years in and around politics have persuaded me of one thing. With exceptions, people's ideological commitments are laughably weak. They infer their beliefs from their tribe, not the other way around. A leader who clearly delineates one group from its rival – through rhetoric, through symbols – can count on credulous adoration. They are providing millions with a sense of belonging that might once have come from religion or ethnicity. Political affiliation becomes what the academic Lilliana Mason calls a “mega-identity”. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, Oct. 24, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Identity politics If there is one thing to be salvaged from Marxist thought – and, really, I must insist on just the one – it is relative indifference to matters of blood. The stress was always on material interest as the motor of history. By rejecting Marx, the US remained free and prosperous, but also defenceless against identity neuroses. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 16, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Identity politics The point on which liberals must therefore insist is that identity is not an “either/or” but an “as-well-as-and.” Timothy Garten Ash, Prospect magazine, January/February 2021 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Local politics All politics is local. Thomas (“Tip”) O'Neill, New York Review of Books, March 13, 1989 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Local politics I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members. Ralph Reed, 1996 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Participation in politics The shortage of people from the working class in our legislatures and the overrepresentation of white-collar Americans means that tax policies are more regressive, business regulations are more probusiness, and social safety net programs are thinner. Who wins and who loses in this country depends in large part on who governs. Nicholas Carnes, White-collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
Participation in politics When [E. E.] Schattschneider analyzed these processes more than a half century ago [1960], he famously concluded that “the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.” Since then, the accent has only gotten thicker: unions have declined, business lobbies have become more numerous and more sophisticated, and campaign donations and spending have reached all-time highs. Nicholas Carnes, White-collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
Politicians The humorless politicians are the most dangerous ones, I think. Armando Iannucci © 2018 Kwiple.com
Politicians In fact, there are ultimately only two kinds of deadly sin in the political realm, lack of objectivity and lack of responsibility. Vanity — the need to put oneself at center stage as much as possible — is what most tempts the politician into either or both of these sins, all the more so as the demagogue has to try to “be effective,” “make an impression,” and thus is always at risk of turning into a mere actor and minimizing his own responsibility for the consequenes of his own actions. Max Weber, “The Politician's Work” in Charisma and Disenchantment, translated by Damion Searls © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politicians A politician is a man who understands government,  and it takes a politican to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years. Harry S. Truman © 2023 Kwiple.com
Politicians A politician is a person who approaches every subject with an open mouth. Adlai Stevenson © 2023 Kwiple.com
Politicians The single most important psychological quality a poltiician needs is the ability to keep people and things at a certain distance. The lack of such detachment is, by itself, a kiss of death for any politician; encouraging our young intellectuals to avoid this “distance” condemns them to be politically useless. Max Weber, “The Politician's Work” in Charisma and Disenchantment, translated by Damion Searls [1919 lecture] © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politics Americans more and more begin by choosing their politics and then choose facts to support their politics. David Frum © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics America's political inclination is to distribute power rather than wealth. Edward Luce, Financial Times, March 7, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Politics Busy with work, child rearing, and managing their households, Americans have little spare time or energy for following what government and politicians do. There are exceptions, especially those who are passionately concerned about global warming or Social Security or any other burning issue. The term for them is “issue publics.” But most people are quite under- standably politically inattentive most of the time. Richard M. Valelly, American Politics © 2018 Kwiple.com
Politics By claiming that the adversarial model of politics and the left/right opposition had become obsolete, and by celebating the ‘consensus at the center‘ between centre-right and centre-left, the so-called ‘radical center’ promoted a technocratic form of politics according to which politics was not a partisan confrontation but the neutral management of public affairs. Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism © 2018 Kwiple.com
Politics The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a 2003 memorandum  © 2016 Kwiple.com
Politics [T]he discontinuities evident in scientific fields make it quite unlikely that a modern scientist would repair to mediaeval science, for example, either for support or inspiration. This, of course, has no bearing on the alleged superiority of scientific over philosophical inquiry. It is mentioned merely to point out that the tradition of political thought is not so much a tradition of discovery as one of meanings extended over time. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics [T]he essence of a “political” order is the existence of a settled institutional arrangement designed to deal in a variety of ways with the vitalities issuing from an associational life: to offset them where necessary, to ease them where possible, and, creatively, to redirect and transmute them when the opporunity allows. This is not to say that a society cannot achieve order by imposition, but only that such a society is not “political.” Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics [E]xpediency is largely the result of the old problem of trying to establish a uniform rule amidst a context of differences. It is this that frequently leads to concessions and modifications in a policy. The reason is not simply that it is a good thing to formulate policies that will reflect a sensitivity to variations  and differences throughout the society, but rather that a political society is simultaneously trying to act and to remain a community. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics Experience shows that the cardinal point to which the rich man directs his efforts, consciously or unconsciously, is preserving his economic “security,” and that unconditional, ruthless political idealism is found, if not exclusively then mostly, among the classes who own nothing and who are thus entirely outside the group with an interest in preserving the existing economic system in a given society. That is especially true in exceptional — that is revolutionary — periods. Max Weber, “The Politician's Work” in Charisma and Disenchantment, translated by Damion Searls © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politics Falling victim to deception is no excuse. Leszak Kolakowski, Is God Happy? Selected Essays  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics From politics, it was an easy step to silence. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics A genuinely political society, in which discusssion and debate are an essential technique, is a society full of risks. It is inevitable that, from time to time, the debate will move from tactics to fundamentals, that there will be a challenge not merely to the immediate policies of those who hold governmental power but to the underlying principles, that there will be a radical challenge. That is not only inevitable, it is desirable. It is also inevitable that those interest- groups who prefer the status quo will resist the challenge, among other means by appealing to traditional, deeply rooted beliefs, myths, values, by playing on (and summoning up) fears. M. I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Politics Guilt is a weak political emotion. Moira Weigel, New York Times, April 21, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics I have aired Ganesh's First Law of Politics before, but allow me a recapitulation. People do not work out their beliefs and then join the corresponding tribe.  They join a tribe and infer their beliefs from it.  The sense of belonging, the group membership, is what hooks people, not the thrill of being right or pursuing a thought on its own terms. Politics has become a team sport, goes the line on this. But even that is too kind. Sports fans are sardonic and irreverent about their own team. It isn’t so central to their identity as to require consistent adherence.   Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 2, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics If conciliation is a continuing task for those who govern—and the nature of “politics” would seem to dictate that it is—then order is not a set pattern, but something akin to a precarious equilibrium, a condition that demands a willingness to accept partial solutions. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics If “the personal is political” was the slogan of the 1960s, docudramas seem to assume that the political is unfailingly personal. Eric Foner, “The Televised Past” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics If they throw a stone at you, you drop a boulder on them.  Mitch McConnell, on campaigning © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politics … if you don't say something provocative, you don't get covered at all. Roger Stone,  the GOP's “king of dirty tricks” © 2016 Kwiple.com
Politics In a rough sense,  the essence of all competitive politics is bribery of the electorate by politicians. Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Politics [I]n confronting the world of nature, man might be at once resigned and curious, for this was an order he could neither create nor change. But in the world of politics, a strongly anthropomorphic attitude prevailed: man could be the architect of order. The political world, in short, was amenable to human art. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics In politics, it is not what you say but what people hear. Edward Luce © 2015 Kwiple.com
Politics [I]n politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard. Samuel Earle, New York Review of Books, October 27, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Politics In politics, the urgent will usually overwhelm the important. David Frum, Trumpocalypse  © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politics Instead of being viewed as a means of bringing citizens together in pursuit of those public interests from which they collectively benefit, politics has come to be seen as but an inefficient mechanism for individuals to pursue their private interests. Richard Bellamy, Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction © 2019 Kwiple.com
Politics It is not normal to be enthusiastic about a politician. Choosing between flawed options is the natural state of democracy. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 13, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Politics It's perfectly possible to conduct yourself with ethics, integrity, and no hint of scandal, even in politics, even in D.C., even in Ukraine. Politics don't corrupt people, people corrupt politics. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, during sentencing of Rick Gates © 2019 Kwiple.com
Politics It's tough campaigning, kissing hands and shaking babies. Pat Paulsen © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics It's tough campaigning, kissing hands and shaking babies. Pat Paulsen © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.  Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics Listen to the silence — not just the noise.  Gillian Tett, Financial Times, October 10, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Politics Looked at in one way, political activities are a response to fun-  damental changes taking place in society. From another point of view, these activities provoke conflict because they represent intersecting lines of action whereby individuals and groups seek to stabilize a situation in a way congenial to their aspirations and needs. Thus politics is both a source of conflict and a mode of activity that seeks to resolve conflicts and promote readjustment. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics No one is innocent after the experience of politics. But not everyone is guilty. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income © 2016 Kwiple.com
Politics One man's dirty trick is another man's civic participation. Roger Stone,  the GOP's “king of dirty tricks” © 2016 Kwiple.com
Politics One test of a civilised country is whether a citizen can go days at a time without thinking about politics. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 14, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Politics Personal ambition is a necessary element for any political candidate. You got to get out of bed in the morning and be able to really believe in your heart that you have something to offer to folks that’s better and different. I have no argument with people who are involved in politics being ambitious. You need to have it, but it can’t be  what governs your decision-making. Ambition can’t be what makes you decide how to do things as a public figure. Chris Christie, Windham, NH, January 10, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Politics The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and liberty. John Maynard Keynes © 2019 Kwiple.com
Politics Political will is a renewable resource. Al Gore © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics Politics, as a practice,  whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams  © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politics Politics as a spectator sport has rarely been more popular. Its mixture of entertainment value with real consequences produces massive audience engagement. Yet at the same time, we're living in an era in which politicians, parliaments and whole political systems are being vilifed in ways they haven't been in decades. … The result is that the most prominent actors on the political stage today are those who cast themselves as non-politican politicians. The era we're living through isn't charact- erized simply by post-truth and populism. It's also, increasingly, an era of anti-politics. Or, at least, the rhetoric of anti-politics. Philip Seargeant, The Art of Political Storytelling © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics Politics in core Europe and the United States now reflects the pathologies of politics in the lands in between [i.e., Central and Eastern Europe]. Increasingly, all countries in Europe and North America occupy a zone of insecurty between a resurgent Russia and an embattled West. All developed Western countries face a “civilization choice” between a liberal international order fraying at the edges and a brave new world of xenophobic nationalism and great power order, between free markets and rule of law or crony capitalism and oligarchic rule. Mitchell A. Orenstein, The Lands In Between © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics Politics is about spending capital to achieve messy results. Being a celebrity is about protecting your brand. Edward Luce, Financial Times, January 11, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Politics Poltics is gut; commercials are gut. Frank Luntz, Republican pollster and creator of “climate change” instead of “global warming,” “death tax” instead of “inheritance tax,” “healthy forests” instead of “clearcutting,” “government takeover” instead of “healthcare reform” © 2015 Kwiple.com
Politics Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening, you coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close. Ronald Reagan © 2023 Kwiple.com
Politics Politics is more difficult than physics. Albert Einstein © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics Politics is show business for ugly people. Roger Stone,  the GOP's “king of dirty tricks” © 2016 Kwiple.com
Politics Politics throws up two sorts of leader. There are those forever reaching for an umbrella and others, far fewer in number, who set out to change the weather. Western democracies have lately boasted a superabundance of politicians sheltering from the storm. Philip Stephens, Financial Times, April 8, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Politics  Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams © 2024 Kwiple.com
Politics Prior to politics, beneath it, enveloping it, restricting it, conditioning it, is the underlying consensus on policy that usually exists in the society among a predominant portion of the politically active members. Without such a consensus no democratic system would long survive the endless irritations and frustrations of elections and party competition. Robert A. Dahl, On Political Equality © 2018 Kwiple.com
Politics Remember the phrase, “It's the economy, stupid?” It was coined by James Carville, strategist of US President Bill Clinton's successful 1992 campaign against George H W Bush. … Yet it doesn't appear to be working for Joe Biden, even though many of the top economic indicators … have been in his favour. … I suspect if Carville was on Biden’s team today, he might come up with a different phrase for the next election cycle: “It's geopolitics, stupid.” Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, February 21, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics A rudder, a bedrock, a cornerstone, a north star: people used to find  these things in their personal relationships. In their church, family, factory or town. As modernity scrambled those things, mostly for the good, the need to subsume oneself into a group was going to have to be met some other way. That turned out to be politics. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 2, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics Someone either lives “for”politics or lives “from” it. These are by no means mutually exclusive — a person generally does both, or at least he tries to. The person who lives “for” politics “organizes his life around it” — he makes  it his life's work, psychologically  speaking. … Those who make politics their permanent source of income  are those who live “from” the work of politics; those who do not are the ones who live “for” politics. Max Weber, “The Politician's Work” in Charisma and Disenchantment, translated by Damion Searls © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politics The task of a politician is not to inspire. It is to get a plurality of voters to say “Oh, go on then.” Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 21, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Politics A thick skin is a gift from God. Konrad Adenauer © 2024 Kwiple.com
Politics This is the basic dilemma of political judgments: how to create a common rule in a context of differences? Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics This notion, that the citizen's choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a “difference,” is in fact the narrative's most central element and its most fictive. Joan Didion, “Insider Baseball” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics A two-party system in which both parties are committed to calibrating the precise level of incremental tinkering required to get elected is not likely to be a meaningful system,  nor is an election likely to be meaning- ful when it is specifically crafted as an exercise in personalismo,  in “appearing presidential” to that diminishing percentage of the population that still pays attention.  Joan Didion, “Eyes on the Prize” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics Voters want a leader to have definition, yes, but mostly in the negative. I won't raise the basic rate of income tax. I won't borrow to spend. I won't reopen Brexit. Beyond that, politicians should view policy detail as some football coaches view possession of the ball: a liability, a chance to make a mistake. A “positive vision” is not what clinches elections. It is the absence of a scary one.  Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 21, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Politics We have, at all times, two kinds of processes going on in inextricable connection with each other: interest politics, the clash of material aims and needs among various groups and blocs; and status politics, the clash of various projective rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives.  In times of depression and economic discontent — and by and large in times of acute national emergency — politics is more clearly a matter of interests, although of course status considerations are still present. In times of prosperity and general well-being on the material plane, status considerations among the masses can become much more influential in our politics. Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt—1954” © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politics We have lost all sense of how weird it is to seek connection with others through politics. And how new. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 2, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics We should never interrupt the enemy while he is making a mistake. Edward Luce, Financial Times, October 14, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics We shouldn't leave the work of politics to people who run for public office. Hillary Clinton © 2016 Kwiple.com
Politics What generates the particular moral problems of politics is, pure and simple, the legitimate use of violence by some groups of people against others. Max Weber, “The Politician's Work” in Charisma and Disenchantment, translated by Damion Searls © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politics What Trump has done is take this human impulse toward cruelty, and elevate it to a political virtue. Adam Serwer © 2021 Kwiple.com
Politics When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mech- anism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mech- anism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the col- umnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life. Joan Didion, “Insider Baseball” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics When you're in a knife fight, you don't ask to be liked. Caroline Fraser, New York Review of Books, March 12, 2020, writing about Elizabeth Warren © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politics The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who. Kevin Phillips, “godfather” of the Republican Party's “Southern strategy” © 2023 Kwiple.com
Politics Without defining an adversary, no hegemonic offense can be launched. However, this is precisely the step that social-democratic parties, converted to neoliberalism, are unable to make. This is because they believe that democracy should aim at reaching consensus and that it is possible to have a politics without an adversary. Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism © 2018 Kwiple.com
Politics  You don't raise the kind of looming statues [of white supremacists] I saw at the State House [of South Carolina] just for the hell of it. Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message © 2024 Kwiple.com
Politics You want results and you get consequences. Poltical truism © 2019 Kwiple.com
 
Stealth politics The practice of “stealth politics” [remaining silent about public issues] raises questions that go beyond the general issue of unequal, money-based political influence. Stealth politics also weakens political accountability. Stealthy billionaires can quietly use their money to promote ideas that are narrowly self-interested and in conflict with the views of most ordinary citizens. By remaining largely silent about their views and obscuring their financial contributions, billionaires can fly under the radar – promoting policies that most citizens reject but drawing little attention. Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? © 2019 Kwiple.com