Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.

In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise.

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

But they were as different as fire and ice. Robert Kennedy thought Eugene McCarthy was pompous, petty, and venal. McCarthy thought Kennedy was a spoiled, unintelligent demagogue.

There are men who desire power simply for the sake of the happiness it will bring; these belong chiefly to political parties.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Political language-and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists-is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.