Elections Quotes - Page 3

One of the most unique aspects among many about the USA is that our transitions of 'power' have almost always been peaceful. This is very unique in all of history and in the world today".

Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier — and much, much harder.

Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay atten

[O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.

Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.

A lie is more profitable than the truth. That is why we have elections.

Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted.

The challenge has always been that "good people" don't know how to win elections

I’d watched the election of Barack Obama with them, in Harlem: the celebration had spilled out onto the streets and erupted into dancing, outdoor champagne-drinking, euphoria. This [the 1/21/17 Women's March on Washington, DC] was different. It was like laughter at a funeral—what else can you do but hold on to who you are and who you love? What can you do but try to stay sane and fight like hell for what life is all about?

History shows us that people often make mistakes, they give wrong decisions, they vote for the wrong persons! And history also shows us that in the end they pay a heavy price for it!

I never understood what it meant to be a Democrat or Republican. I'm fully American and agree on some issues presented by both - but not all of them. So why do I have to pick a side? Nobody can say they agree with every single issue proposed by any team unless they lack the ability to think for themselves. To me, both parties are the same. A method to distract and divide a nation from using common sense and logic. I would want a leader to represent every fraction of the country as one united SUM. To make the country stronger, not weaker. One thing I know for certain, is to never choose a leader who needs their speeches written for them. If they cannot communicate to the public directly with their own heart, then they are not a true leader.

Ballot papers do not define leaders. Leadership is defined by conviction, vision, passion and inspiration.

Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the welder, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.

During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.

If you put your politicians up for sale, as the US does (alone in this among industrialized democracies), then someone will buy them--and it won’t be you; you can’t afford them.

We elected a man who knows how to build walls when we needed someone who knows how to build bridges.

It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.

A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.

At the federal level, this problem could be greatly alleviated by abolishing the Electoral College system. It's the winner-take-all mathematics from state to state that delivers so much power to a relative handful of voters. It's as if in politics, as in economics, we have a privileged 1 percent. And the money from the financial 1 percent underwrites the microtargeting to secure the votes of the political 1 percent. Without the Electoral College, by contrast, every vote would be worth exactly the same. That would be a step toward democracy.