Political Memory Quotes

All presidents are subject to the tides of revisionist history, their legacies constantly in flux.

I can't remember in 1980 who I voted for. I wish I could tell you.

My earliest political memory is of attending, in 1975, a tub-thumping campaign rally with my father in Adelaide.

Many pundits today are in the habit of misquoting Santayana's epigram, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Maybe some people have come to grief this way, but they are probably fewer than those who have fallen into the opposite error. One is apt to perish in politics from too much memory, Tocqueville wrote somewhere, with equal truth and greater insight.

The public will forget the government before it is born.

The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.

Well, politics is much more severe than entertainment. You have to hit those points, in politics, word for word. You have to remember the date. You have to remember the website. You have to rehearse stories that might be asked, have anecdotes ready for questions that might come up.

My particular passion for Lincoln dates back from my earliest memories of politics.

Elected leaders who forget how they got there won't the next time.

The proper memory for a politician is one that knows what to remember and what to forget.

History is one of those things that politicians tend not to use.

For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past.

I do believe that [Bill] Clinton never inhaled ...because when I met him, he had no idea who I was.

I think, first of all, you know, Washington has a bad habit of a very short attention span.

A statesman is a politician who’s been dead ten or fifteen years.

The unexpressed aim of every politician is to influence events that history books will record his name - and spell it right.

Voters memories will fade some.

The most unusual thing about Clinton as a pol is that he listens. Listens and remembers. If he does dance with them that brung him, not them that gave him big money, we will have a populist on our hands.

How many State of the Union addresses do people remember? They don't resonate that way.

I have one of the strongest records in fighting for senior citizens. I led the effort to prevent cuts to Social Security. But I think for some seniors, they remember the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union. They conflated the term "democratic socialism" with communism.

I have always noticed in politics how often men are ruined by having too good a memory.

The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.

When it comes time to default, they’re not going to remember any of the Republicans’ names. They are going to remember in history books one name, and that's Obama.