If you are not a good listener, you cannot be a good politician.

Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers.

But regardless of whose fault it is, most politicians today are not human beings. You want to pry open their mouths and shout into the darkness, 'Hello! Is there a human being in there?' Buried under all that lust for office, all that fear of offending a contributor? I know there must be.

It’s not true I think all politicians are morons. Morons are far too intelligent to be politicians.

By the way, even the politicians who often anger me with their short-sightedness and their malice are not, for the most part, evil-minded. They are, rather, inexperienced, easily infected with the particularisms of the time, easily manipulated by suggestive trends and prevailing customs; often they are simply caught up, unwillingly, in the swirl of bad politics, and find themselves unable to extricate themselves because they are afraid of the risks this would entail.

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

Why do male politicians get this so wrong? Unfortunately, the answer is simple: because they believe what they are saying. Galloway, [Todd] Akin and [Craig] Murray represent the tip of an iceberg of resentment and base sexism.

Politics is stressful, it's scary, tiresome. Acting is like a breath of fresh air. They're both fictional kind of creativity: politicians are bad actors.

Being a politician is a poor profession. Being a public servant is a noble one.

Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.

Every politician has a promising career. Unfortunately, most of them do not keep those promises.

Politicians are always trying to make you believe that they’re good, moral, consistent. Don’t ever fall in their trap. There’s no such thing as a good, moral, consistent politi­cian. Politics is give-and-take, as my father taught me when he said, »Never hit a man unless you’re ready to be hit twice by him.«

The thing that politicians are seemingly unable to understand is that you cannot produce a vigorous literature by terrorising everyone into conformity.

He wonders if there is some requirement that you have to be an idiot to be a politician.