“Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn’t have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.”

Before this learning experience, I had assumed that with regard to programs that sought to help people out of poverty, the political world was essentially divided into two camps: conservatives who opposed these for a variety of reasons, and liberals who supported them.

NATO was a wonderful idea. It was formed in 1949. We are as far away from NATO as NATO was when it was done in time from the presidency of Grover Cleveland.

Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there’s no hierarchy.

In America, unlike England, unlike Israel, unlike Japan, other democracies, we have elections that have staggered terms.

Capitalism works better from every perspective when the economic decision makers are forced to share power with those who will be affected by those decisions.

Nothing in the world is as mobile as capital. It can move anywhere in the world instantaneously.

I smoke a cigar or two a day. I did have a brownie once. It made me sleepy.

I am not aware of any specific provision that mandates any tightening of lending to small business other than a requirement that people who lend and then sell that loan be prepared to take a part of the risk. And I’m proud of that.

A leader can`t move a country that`s not ready. You can`t make the waves, but when you see them coming, you can help direct them.

These two entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.

Well, many of us believe that excessive media concentration is a subject that ought to be addressed, and it is, of course, the intention of the majority party not to allow that to be discussed.

Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.

They have to convert our agenda into something aggressive. Two guys wanting to be happy together are invading their marriages. Helping a kid who’s getting beaten up in school is promoting homosexuality. If you gave me a million dollars, I wouldn’t know how to promote homosexuality.

Ronald Reagan got a lot of democrats. I wish he hadn`t. I got to Congress with Reagan coming to the Whitehouse. The Reagan Program, a very radical one, a very drastic one passed because he had a lot of democrats. He worked at it personally and also because Reagan retained a popularity.

Bush senior used to say that we have more will than wallet. So he urged the country to attack poverty with a thousand points of light, none of which could be eaten.

But on those occasions when I do strongly disagree with the Democrats and I don’t say anything, I think I forfeit my right to have people pay attention to me when I say the things that I don’t like about what Republicans are saying.

But alas, they are all sadly deficient, because they leave us under the domination of political and religious prejudices

Some critics have commented that understanding the specific Brazilian political context of the novel is helpful for reading Quiet Creature. This may be true, but it’s not prerequisite for understanding it.

Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers

I think it’s always dangerous to make political arguments in a religiously ideological way. And it’s very dangerous to treat as traitors to the American nation those who think differently.

The worst part of governing, the political side, is the grossest part, so that’s what they call it. So anything that reeks of that immediately gets tuned out by 70 percent of the population.

We lack a political culture, a culture of compromise. We in Poland, as well as the Hungarians, have never learned this sort of thing.

There’s such an aggressively a political movement in the US that anything that smells of being political – even the term “political” is so ridiculous, when you think about it.

The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.