Joe Klein Quotes

Democracy allows rhetoric, false empathy and emotion to pummel rational thinking - so it's no wonder so many politicians thrive in it.

What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.

War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.

We first fought... in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.

George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.

I don't know much about Americanism, but it's a damn good word with which to carry an election.

Everyone wants to demagogue everyone else. That may be good politics, but it's awful policy.

Our politicians don't say anything anymore: they just refute and assert.

Unfortunately, religion, like patriotism, is easy to misuse for political purposes.

A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.

Ronald Reagan's legacy is deeply misunderstood because there are political actors in America who, for several reasons, have privately held agendas that they want to sell to the American public in the most appealing way possible. They often find the best way to do that is to package their product with the Reagan brand.

Each side had its uninformed fanatics. And each side had political leaders who fanned the flames with their rhetoric.

We decided to act carefully, concealing our aims, because if the movement were frankly revolutionary it would not be supported by the general mass of people... Since the natives are indifferent to the word liberty it is necessary to make them believe that the rising is undertaken simply to favor King Ferdinand.

The homes of America are horrified and the intelligence of Americans is insulted by weird television advertising by which this Administration threatens the end of the world unless all-wise Lyndon is given the nation for his very own.

Here's your enemy for this week, the government says. And some gullible Americans click their heels and salute -- often without knowing who or even where the enemy of the week is.

In a war, as indeed at most times, we become the ready victims of phrases.

With the use of religious and patriotic formulas, statesmen may sleep amidst the wreck of nations.

Unfortunately in this country we now have a demagogue ... one that is reckless with the truth.

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology

...the worst horror of the Russian Revolution was the letting loose of one hundred million orators, for their passion for talk was immediately responsible for all the other horrors ...Oratory prevented Russia from becoming a constitutional country

in countries where the ability to read and write has been recently acquired or where the people have had no long experience in governing themselves on the basis of their own thinking, it is easy for demagogues to arise and prostitute the mind of the common man to their own base ends

“[T]he manufactured image of the domestic Communist, cultivated and propagated by [J. Edgar] Hoover, the Catholic Church, the American Legion, and political opportunists, made of Communists something less than full humans, full citizens, fully rights-endowed …

Liberals are the enemy of ordinary Americans!