Gaylord Nelson Quotes

Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.

In politics there's never a magic wand.

Politics is the art of realizing what there is to realize.

We have the means and the capacity to deal with our problems, if only we can find the political will.

I'm not a professional politician, I'm a problem solver.

A week is a long time in politics.

Providing the vision is easy. Getting policy right is hard. The hard thing about the modern world is doing it. The world is changing so fast.

We live in times of wonderful technology and crappy politics. The task before us now is not to let the latter destroy the former.

Governing has always been hard.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

It's so much easier to throw rocks than it is to govern.

If war is the solution, why didn't Roosevelt declare war on poverty?

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

Good ideas are the backbone of good government.

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

It is the future, of course, which politicians grapple with, and that is why politics is so disorderly. Only history clears away some of the debris.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

The art of politics is knowing what to do next.

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

My responsibility as president is to take care to solve the problems we are facing now and to provide a vision and direction for how our nation should advance in the future.

So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.

There wasn't so many ISSUES like there are today. It was a simpler time.

The world is changing very profoundly.