Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The fantasy world of Movement Conservatives is no longer fringe talk. The leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination embrace it. They are playing to a chorus of true believers, and they are preaching what that choir wants to hear. They are following the same pattern Eric Hoffer identified as the path to authoritarianism.
Argentina has elected a centre-right president, Mauricio Macri. Bolivia's Evo Morales, having lost a referendum that would have allowed him a fourth presidential term, spends his time muttering about CIA plots and issuing threats to jail journalists who persist in reporting influence-peddling scandals. The economy is a sputtering shambles.
It's extraordinary to me - you cannot name a presidential candidate in history who has singlehandedly, through bad trade deals, destroyed more American jobs and more American factories than Hillary Clinton. She did NAFTA, she did China's entry into the World Trade Organization, she did the South Korean 2012 deal - every single one of those.
Do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself, 'Go to! here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him.' or, 'I shall set my heart upon this musician, whose fame is on every tongue?' or 'this financier, who controls the world's money markets?'
In September 2008 - as Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and AIG, the world's biggest insurance company, accepted a federal bailout - Senator John McCain of Arizona, in what was widely viewed as a political move, suspended his presidential campaign and called on Obama to rush back to Washington for a bipartisan meeting at the White House.
Part of the reason [Donald Trump] destroyed his Republican challengers is because they agree with him on issues. And he apparently struck a vein of entertainment among the Republican primary voters, so all they had left was kind of whining and insulting back and forth, as opposed to taking him on where I think a presidential election should.
Working on 'The War Room' was a thrill, not only because we were given such exquisite access to the nerve center of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, but for me personally, it was so exciting to be producing my first film and working with documentary filmmaking legends D.A. Pannebaker and Chris Hegedus, who were the film's directors.
When I was a West Virginia lad of 17, I met a Massachusetts lad of 42 by the name of John F. Kennedy. At the time, I was in a bright orange suit that I had just purchased to wear to the 1960 National Science Fair, where I hoped my home-built rockets would win a medal. Kennedy was in West Virginia trying to win the state's presidential primary.
I had a moment in the Library of Congress among the presidential papers. I opened a folder, and there was an envelope in it. The front of the envelope was facing the table, so I didn't know what was in it. I opened it and out spilled all this hair. I turned the envelop over and it says, 'Clipped from President Garfield's head on his deathbed.'
When you're a Republican Latino, you're traveling uphill on a lonely road. Still, it's the road I prefer. It has led me to opportunity far beyond my dreams. I've worked on eight Republican presidential races, as well as for some of the world's largest corporations, all because the doors of opportunity, not the doors of welfare, were open to me.
A triumph in which Kissinger could claim to have played some little part, in the presidential elections that November, President Richard Nixon had won the second greatest landslide in American history. Forty-seven million Americans had voted for him - and for his and Kissinger's policies - representing more than 60 percent of all the votes cast.
When candidate Donald Trump ran for the highest office in the land, he promised to fight for forgotten Americans. In the presidential election of 2016, the forgotten Americans of the Upper Midwest and the coal country of Kentucky and West Virginia, many of them life-long Democrats, delivered a decisive win for this first-time Republican candidate.
I`m talking about the presidential nominee on the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton is corrupt. And she`s lied. And she`s under another criminal investigation. I have yet to hear Hillary Clinton distance herself from a lot of the awful anti-police rhetoric that comes out of some of her supporters. She just sort of ignores it like she didn`t hear it.
When you hear 'experience,' that's all about resume. And Obama didn't have the resume. But we knew, long before that, 'steady in a crisis' was much more important than 'experience.' When you watched the presidential campaign, you saw that Obama was the one who happened to be steady... He demonstrated aspects of his character people were hungry for.
Every presidential candidate for decades has released his tax returns, and I've released 33 years of my tax returns. The American people deserve to know about our taxes. And so Donald Trump is standing in the way of precedent that goes back on both sides of aisle Democrats and Republicans, and he clearly has something that he doesn't want us to see.
Economics, as it is often taught today, portrays us as homo economicus-someone who doesn't vote in presidential elections, doesn't return lost wallets, and doesn't leave tips when dining out of town. Julie Nelson reminds us that most people aren't really like that. She helps point the way to a richer, more descriptive way of thinking about economic life.
The fact remains that we're running a presidential campaign. And we're doing that through appearances like today, fund-raisers like today, where Donald Trump was in Texas, raising money, not just for the trump campaign, but, drumroll, please, for the RNC and the Republican committees, which benefits all these candidates that Paul Ryan is trying to protect.
The United States have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent - that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgement.
One of the things that will probably need to be addressed is in the treatment of history, i.e. the Presidential Papers Act. If they can act with impunity, if they know that what they're doing is not going to see the light of day anytime in their lifetime, if they have the right to withhold information from the public, then presidents are given a vastly freer hand.
want to get to the substance of the book ["Thank You for Being Late"], but it is so closely connected to this presidential election. And you also wrote a series of columns during the campaign, very tough on Donald Trump. You called him a disgusting human being and now you're calling the election a moral 9/11 only 9/11 was done to us from the outside. We did this to ourselves.
The day after the Republican convention ended, there was another political bomb that was dropped on the U.S. presidential election [2016] from Russia. The day after the Republican convention ended, right before the Democratic Convention began we got what U.S. intelligence agencies believed to be the next big Russian incursion into our election. We got the first WikiLeaks dump.
The Donald Trump phone call with the president of Taiwan seems very much in line with his rhetoric during the campaign that he intended to be tough on China. And don't forget, we have seen a lot of presidential candidates, memorably, Bill Clinton, who used to criticize George Herbert Walker Bush for coddling dictators and then take the much softer line with China once he's in office.
Donald Trump didn't know the [Democratic] vice presidential candidate he was running against: Tim Kaine [Senator] of Virginia, Donald! Not Thomas Kean, Republican [former Governor] of New Jersey, you moron! And his answer to absolutely every question is so simplistic and grand: "Oh, I'll fix it. Trust me. I'm the best fixer. I love to fix!!! Look at everything I've fixed before!!!!".
This wasn’t just an attack against the Boston Marathon... It was an attack against the American public and our democratic use of the streets. We have used our public roadways for annual parades, protest marches, presidential inaugurations, marathons, and all manner of other events. The roads belong to us, and their use represents an important part of our free and democratic tradition.
Mr. Roosevelt, this is my principal request--it is almost the last request I shall ever make of anybody. Before you leave the presidential chair, recommend Congress to submit to the Legislatures a Constitutional Amendment which will enfranchise women, and thus take your place in history with Lincoln, the great emancipator. I beg of you not to close your term of office without doing this.
With the Republican Party`s presidential front-runner proposing that all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States, that perhaps there ought to be a national registry of Muslims, that we ought to looking into Muslims having to carry government ID cards that state their religion, now, the word fascist is being used to describe this ascending and leading Republican politician.
After multiple trips to Paris and being accused of participating in 'heinous' activities in regard to the state, I found my Romanian nationality revoked by 'presidential decree' in 1975. Because I hadn't asked for political asylum like everyone else, I had to live and travel with the infamous Nansen Passport from then on. This wasn't easy...I finally obtained my French citizenship in 1983.
The brutality of the pace. This was my third presidential campaign and it was a thousand times faster paced than my first one in 2004. The news cycle is constant and there has been an explosion in the number of news outlets covering them. As as result we're witnessing news and entertainment melding together to create what I'd describe as the "American Idolization" of campaigns and politics.
I did not know in the beginning how important the trip would be but we knew that Iran was in the crosshairs of the Neo-Conservative movement. And when you listen to Mr. Ted Cruz, the Republican presidential hopeful, and when you listen to Mr. Marco Rubio, a Republican presidential candidate, when you listen to their language, it says to me that they are agents of the Neo-Conservative strategy.
There certainly is a pattern of administrations that have good transitions, George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and administrations that have really bad transitions, I would say Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. I would say this is beginning to look like a bad transition, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump as they begin to argue even at the presidential level, which is more or less unprecedented.
There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a New Frontier for American art.
If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal.
What can Americans learn from the Olympics spectacle? According to the IMF, China will succeed America as the dominant economic power in the course of the next presidential term, so Howard Fineman, editorial director of the Huffington Post and MSNBC mainstay, was anxious to pick up tips. 'Brits long ago lost their empire,' he tweeted, 'but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully.' So there's that.
Fellow countrymen: At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first...The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers—even presidential legacies—for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.
The bottom feeders of the entertainment industry were never invited to presidential inaugurations. The bottom feeders of the entertainment were never used as fundraisers for presidents of the United States. They were ignored. There was always a line. They were always there, and they were always who they were, and they always did what they did. The bottom feeders have now become the standard. That's what's different.
Nothing will motivate conservative evangelical Christians to vote Republican in the 2008 presidential election more than a Democratic nominee named Hillary Rodham Clinton - not even a run by the devil himself ... I certainly hope that Hillary is the candidate. She has $300 million so far. But I hope she's the candidate. Because nothing will energize my [constituency] like Hillary Clinton. If Lucifer ran, he wouldn't.
The not-visibly-insane Democrats all claim they'll get rough with the terrorists, but they can't even face Brit Hume. In case you missed this profile in Democrat machismo, the Democratic presidential candidates are refusing to participate in a debate hosted by Fox News Channel because the hosts are "biased." But they'll face down Mahmoud Ahmadinejad! At this, even Hillary Clinton was thinking, "Come on, guys - let's grow a pair."
It doesn't need to be deep and it doesn't need to be a 65-point plan, but just to give some concrete examples of how this economy is going to work for the people that feel right now it's not working for them, and then finally to get to central tension of this campaign. This is a presidential campaign where you have Americans now who want to see change. And Hillary Clinton is the status quo. How can she be both status quo and change?
You don't feel you have the same voice in a presidential election if you live in a solid blue or a solid red state. I also don't think we've educated voters well on the different ways in which primaries work in different states. It doesn't need to be the case that you end up with one Democrat and one Republican, you have open primaries, you can have jungle primaries. There are various permutations and combinations of how to do this.
We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions - by abandoning every value except the will to power - they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies.
Almost no one under 60 remembers what fundraising was like before Watergate. Until the 1970s, campaign money was collected by "bagmen," familiar characters from the world of organized crime. As fans of Boardwalk Empire know, a bagman is a political fixer who walked around with stacks of $100 and $1,000 bills. At lower levels, he used brown paper bags. In presidential campaigns, the cash was more likely to be in briefcases. Classier that way.
The United States ... has been proud of its association with the State of Israel. We shall continue to stand with Israel. We are committed to Israel's survival and security. The United States for a quarter of a century has had an excellent relationship with the State of Israel. We have cooperated in many, many fields - in your security, in the well-being of the Middle East, and in leading what we all hope is a lasting peace throughout the world.
Good poems do a lot of things at once. Often, by doing so, they encourage us to acknowledge mixed and incompatible feelings. Good poems, like good works of history, resist monocausal explanations for anything. There's not one reason why I am angry or excited or hopeful, when I feel those things. And there's not one reason why President Obama won two elections. And there's not one reason why Donald Trump won the most recent presidential election.
It has been said that Canada is bounded 'on the north by gold, on the west by the East, on the east by history - and on the south by friends'.* We hope that will always be the case and we hope it will be the case not only with respect to the United States, your immediate neighbor to the south, but with respect to all your southern neighbors - and ours - who are bound by the great forces of geography and history which are distinctive to the New World.
Let me just say that anything that I say about what's going on at Justice is pure speculation. Obviously, you know, I'm just going based on my experience as the attorney general, but, yeah, surprised because typically you don't talk about investigations. And it kind of surprised me that that letter went out, and I suppose that the reason for it is because we're in the middle of a presidential campaign. But nonetheless, I think it would be contrary to typical protocol.
There in front of me was the Senator on the floor being held by the busboy. There was nobody else around, and I made my first frame, and I forgot to focus the camera. The second frame was a little more in focus... then just for a second, while everything was open, the busboy looked up, and he had this look in his eye. I made that picture, and then suddenly the whole situation closed in again. And it became bedlam.(On the 1968 shooting of U.S. presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy.)
Pope Francis said the use of contraception could be justified in regions hit by the Zika virus; a stance that could reignite a debate over the church's prohibition of the use of condoms to stop the spread of the AIDS virus. The pope also criticized Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as 'not Christian' for his immigration stance, and broke with his predecessors by suggesting that Catholic lawmakers are free to vote for same-sex marriage and civil unions if they want to.
Here you have the Republican Party, and they had, what, 16, 15 candidates seek the Republican nomination? And Donald Trump won it. And they have been enraged actually since day one when Trump announced, and his statement did not result in a Trump implosion, and then future Trump statements and appearances did not result in a Trump implosion. But the candidates that the Republican Party...They thought they had the best presidential field ever, and they hated and resented Trump for that.
All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will be full of bitterness, and that most of it will be caused by religion. I count Prohibition as a part of religion, for it has surely become so in the United States. The Prohibitionists, seeing all their other arguments destroyed by the logic of events, have fallen back upon the mystical doctrine that God is somehow on their side, and that opposing them thus takes on the character of blasphemy.