Clark M. Clifford Quotes

Politics is the only field in which the more experience you have, the worse you get.

I think experience is a terribly overrated idea when it comes to thinking about who should become president.

Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs.

Good government only happens when the people working in it do their jobs, and do them well.

You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

Gov. Romney is a proven and effective leader with vast experience in the business world, in the non-profit world and in government. And in every capacity in which he has ever served, he has been effective as a leader.

If you are really interested in making government work, you should have the experience of working in government.

I was elected to come to an incredibly dysfunctional capital and make the government work better, and that's what I'm doing.

Administration is the essence of government, and its quality is a prime condition of civic comfort.

A lot of mistakes [in government] are made by people with little experience.

A mayor is a political leader for a city. He doesn't know anything necessarily about city administration, and furthermore he shouldn't have to.

Our people are slow to learn the wisdom of sending character instead of talent to Congress. Again and again they have sent a man of great acuteness, a fine scholar, a fine forensic orator, and some master of the brawls has crunched him up in his hands like a bit of paper.

I was a business man. When they elected me, it took me two years to learn about how government ran.

With the rashness of ignorance the uninitiated dare to dabble in affairs of state.

You're going to find that, intellectually, the [governors] as a whole are a cut or two above what they were 10 or 20 years ago.

Choose the manager of your government as you would the manager of your private business.

When you get into an airplane, you expect a pilot who knows how to fly. Running a Government is also an expertise.

I have been a civil servant and a politician for over 30 years.

I happen to believe that if we want to replace a lifetime politician like Barack Obama, who had no experience leading anything... We've got to nominate a leader if we're going to replace someone who is not a leader.

I am opposed to term limits because if we did not have seasoned professionals, we would not have the good government that we have.

The government may be made up of clever, sensible people. But if they do not believe in basic human values, the more clever or shrewd they are the greater the tragedy they will create.

A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.

Tony Blair was a good politician but not a good Prime Minister, and that's what we don't want to be. We don't want to be just people who are good at winning elections: we want to be good at governing. I think we benefit from having seen the mistakes that we think Tony Blair made in 1997.

Nikki Haley is a proven leader. And that is what she should be judged on.

Well, I spent 23 years in politics, and bits of that were fun.