Joshua Micah Marshall Quotes

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

The office of the president is the most powerful in the world. It is also, at times, the most powerless.

We often imagine that the court serves as a sort of neutral umpire controlling the warring political branches. But this is mostly myth. The justices of the Supreme Court are themselves actors in the struggle for power, and when they intervene, they think carefully about how their decisions will affect the court's own legitimacy and authority.

I have no ambitions to be a cabinet minister, or prime minister. I wouldn't wish being prime minister on my worst enemy.

A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants.

It’s a political process to get to be a United States Attorney but after that, politicians have to adopt a hands off approach to the U. S. Attorneys.

The second office of the government is honorable & easy; the first is but a splendid misery.

For the politician the goal is always to be in the government.... Everything is about the struggle for office. The purpose of power, the problem to solve, is forgotten.

The Secretary of the State at the time was James Baker, who had also been Secretary of Treasury and White House Chief of Staff: very powerful guy. And I went to see him in his very ornate office at the State Department to say I wasn't going to cover him anymore. It was just a courtesy call.

India has a law. The political parties or the religious heads have no right to control that law.

There's no way in the world you're going to make a political party respectable unless you keep it out of office.

There are, perhaps, few men who can for any length of time enjoy office and power without being more or less under the influence of feelings unfavorable to the faithful discharge of their political duties.

His [the President's] office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it.

Has the international criminal court avoided opening an investigation into alleged war crimes in Gaza due to political pressure. The answer is an unequivocal “no”. As prosecutor of the ICC, I reject any suggestion of this in the strongest terms.

I was an assistant U.S. attorney. I was the associate attorney general of the United States, third-ranking official under Ronald Reagan.

I suppose people also have to be a little more careful or circumspect if they're going to leverage their celebrity to promote their political aims. The problem is that politics is about the accretion of power, and it's very difficult not to get giddy with power.

Political power means the capacity to regulate national life through national representatives.

Power always works from the corner office.

The state itself becomes more and more identified with the interests of those who run things than with the interests of the people in general.

Any political historian can give innumerable examples of one percenters who have gone on to success, maybe even Bill Clinton himself?

America deserves a nominee who reveres the law, not one whose service on the bench is conditioned on political promises.

At least on the domestic side of things that you're seeing, [Mike] Pence has that influence big time. But when it comes with what political fights to have?

It's this mingling of the economic and political elite which is really destroying our democracy.

It [concentration of wealth and power] has been a menace to . . . American democracy.

Above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority.