Politics is the only field in which the more experience you have, the worse you get.

If you believe you can make a difference, not just in politics, in public service, in advocacy around all these important issues, then you have to be prepared to accept that you are not going to get 100 percent approval.

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting 'the rich' to pay 'their fair share' is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

When I was 15 years old and in the tenth grade, I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at that time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

And it turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.

Politics are not the task of a Christian.

I never stood for any president in my life, never voted, before Barack Obama. It changed my life to vote. It starts there with me. I never cared for politics before Barack Obama. I never thought it mattered to people like me.

It's not okay to lie about people and particularly not okay to hurl the worst imaginable names at people just because you think you might not like their politics.

The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.

The way the Queens Democratic party machine has worked, they operate on a politics of exclusion.

The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.

Trying to take money out of politics is like trying to take jumping out of basketball.

Politics is a profession; a serious, complicated and, in its true sense, a noble one.

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.

The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

Too often, we see wedge politics and petty rhetoric used to belittle adversaries and inflame partisan divisions.

The United States brags about its political system, but the President says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm and something else when he leaves.

True, the country is divided, but it's not Right and Left. It's Left and Not Left. It is because, for liberals, politics is personal and therefore extremely loud. For the rest of us, we prefer community over calamity.

My father was the Prime Minister of Pakistan. My grandfather had been in politics, too; however, my own inclination was for a job other than politics. I wanted to be a diplomat, perhaps do some journalism - certainly not politics.

It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy.

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

As politics is disconnected from its ethical and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them.

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

Hypocrisy is the scarlet letter in politics.

Well Australia's been in Afghanistan from the get go, way back in 2001, but we have been resolute throughout and with support from both sides of Australian politics.

Democracy is a revelation, but it's complicated. There are elections to hold, politics to create, rights to assert, grievances to settle and institutions to build. To many, it's exhilarating. For others, it can be disappointing when it turns out that democracy doesn't immediately make life better.

I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.

One lesson you better learn if you want to be in politics is that you never go out on a golf course and beat the President.

When a Cabinet Minister who is sacked for telling lies is re-appointed, in the face of every constitutional convention, only for the same man to be sacked again from the same Cabinet for the same offence by the same Prime Minister no wonder the public are cynical about politics.

One thing I like about boxing is that I will not have to deal with the same kind of politics that I had to in skating. In boxing, it is not about your appearance, or how your costume looks, what color it is, or how much it costs.

When an issue is so fraught with partisanship, a special counsel provides some modicum of transparency and accountability rather the the veil of politics.

When governments become large, voters cannot exercise close oversight, otherwise known as political power.

If, however, the success of a politician is to be measured by the degree in which he is able personally to influence the course of politics, and attach to himself a school of political thought, then Mr. Mill, in the best meaning of the words, has succeeded.

We cannot change the politics issue until we change the culture around it; until we talk about what parents do for their kids as an act of love. That's a cultural conversation.

The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.

I am not with any political party. I laugh at media reports of my entering politics.

It always seemed to me ironic that the McCain campaign kept referring sneeringly to Obama's meager resume - 'a mere community organizer!' - before he entered electoral politics. It was Obama's experience as a community organizer that proved such a killer app when he applied that skill to the Internet.

When politics is interesting, people go vote.

Hypocrisy needs to be called out in American politics, and the absurd has reached the point where it is just insufferable.

I am not God. Nor am I Phantom. I am ready to accept any criticism. I have been in politics for decades. Each and every day, in several media, there is criticism of me.

The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems.

The basis of Ronald Reagan was his humanity. I might not have agreed with his politics, but my research - all I read about him and by him - was that he was revered because he had a big heart. He was very religious and sincere. He believed that one spoke truths because, otherwise, people would know you were lying. None of that even applies to Trump.

So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.