“If anyone rises to power, it s not only because he could, but also because the stars were aligned in his favor. Many with apparent means to take it failed simply because they weren t destined for the honor”
“These politicians impressed him as being the most shortsighted and sceptical men he had ever met. They lived in a little world that was bounded on the one side by office and on the other by the constituencies, and they seemed unable to imagine that it was not an eternal world. One tall man, he observed, in the year of grace 1941 was wearing a long frock-coat and a peculiar half-stiff collar reminiscent of that great parliamentary hand, Mr. Gladstone. They talked with one another about divisions; the government majority had dropped to twenty; and they talked about a scene in the House. The P.M. s manners were becoming intolerable. Then with an air of relaxation they turned to Rud. The possibility of altering opinions in the constituencies seemed a very theoretical one to them. No doubt there were these waves of opinion in the country, and an intelligent parliamentary politician observed them and dodged about among them, but it was quite outside their technique to consider how the pressures of opinion could accumulate and be directed.”
“My wife does not need the whole country to play politics with. We are only the two of us at home but she plays the highest form of politics with me. That’s why I don t understand her ways. I think I need to do a bit of political science to understand her”
“His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, “cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization.” It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness… Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.”
“When you initiate something creative and develop your policies that are solution based, you would then be able to flourish audiences who can heavily rely on your ideas for future success.”
“I d gone to Central America because I didn t think politics was simply a matter of opinion. It wasn t about having the right line, having an ideologically pure analysis. It had to be incarnate. And now I was seeing the same thing with faith. It couldn t be about wrangling over the Bible to find justification for your convictions. Like politics, faith had to be about action.”
“Corrupt judicial practices in Russia, America, China, Great Britain, and other countries only vary by a single degree: the cost of services.”
“It s unfortunate to be bitten by political ambition. The deadly disease causes a man to want to access power by all means either by sacrificing others to its altar or by sacrificing himself when he fails.”
“If you don t do politics , trust me - politics will do you.”