Yegor Ligachev Quotes

Good or bad, political choices have an impact on the way country’s behave.

Governing has always been hard.

The issues are too complicated for government leaders to discuss, and too important for bureaucrats.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Government is not an exact science.

Government is about hard choices.

Public policy must lead and not merely react.

To govern is to chose.

You can’t start a conversation about public policy by saying it is complex.

You can’t make policy on the basis of slogans.

Politics is a lot tougher than physics.

Government is about priorities.

Sausage making and policy-making shouldn't be seen close-up.

When you're in governance, you understand the limitations and the complexities of governance.

The issues are by some geometric number - 100 or 200 or 500 - times more complicated today than we appreciated them to be when Franklin Roosevelt was around.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

So I went into government with a clear mind about what the problems were, and what needed to be done.

Good ideas are the backbone of good government.

You have to spend your political capital on great causes for your country.

Politics is tricky; it cuts both ways. Every time you make a choice, it has unintended consequences.

You do the policy, I'll do the politics.

I know how to take good ideas and turn them into sensible law at great odds.

The central issue of our time - of all times - is the size, power and scope of government.

Every policy is shaped by two forces: background analysis and foreground politics. The political forces are loud, self-serving and, in the case of energy policy, well known.

The message I'm trying to send is that technology is political, and that many decisions that look like decisions about technology actually are not at all about technology - they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinized as closely as we would scrutinize decisions about politics.