Power Broker Quotes

Rupert Murdoch has been around since the dinosaurs. He knows how to get around any independent board - as he did with me, and as he's done with other editors as well.

The boss of all bosses operates like a shifty-eyed precinct captain on the make ... These are activities on would expect of a small-time ward heeler, not a figure of such influence and stature.

Saying the Washington Post is just a newspaper is like saying Rasputin was just a country priest.

He [Nasan Nasrallah] is the shrewdest leader in the Arab world and the most dangerous.

[Senator Roscoe Conkling is:] A great fighter, inspired more by his hates than his loves.

In 2009, my father wanted me to join politics. I told him, 'Why should I jump into the dirt and grime of politics when I can have politicians come to me as owner of a media group?' Then my father gave me an ultimatum.

Trump is a real estate guy who sucks up to power to get buildings built.

John Boehner was and is an unprincipled ward-heeler who simply couldn't weather the transition of the Republican Party from a corporatist party with a sizable conservative base to a purely conservative party.

Trump is very plugged in. He's very connected.

You know, Rupert Murdoch I've said is like an Italian when it comes to negotiations.

Whenever anything extraordinary is done in American municipal politics, whether for good or for evil, you can trace it almost invariably to one man. The people do not do it. Neither do the 'gangs,' 'combines,' or political parties.

I've never been an oligarch. The definition of an oligarch is someone who has co-operated with the government, and I never did.

Brian Burke as we now know was the most influential person in the West Australian Labor Party, if you could attract him, you're in business.

Booker Washington was essentially the head Republican boss in the South. He was a power broker.

For some of us who have seen the other side of Allen Dulles, we don’t see too many Christian traits. I personally consider him a ruthless, ambitious, and utterly incompetent government administrator.

Believe it or not, I got into the charismatic, shady, sly heart of Sedgewick Bell by watching CNN and C-SPAN.

If you can sell yourself as someone who knows how Washington works, someone who has these relationships, that's a very marketable commodity. If you're seen as someone who knows how this town works, someone who is a usual suspect in this town, you can dine out for years - that's why no one leaves.

Trump's election was dispiriting and confounding to most traditional political players - perhaps nobody more so than Murdoch. Still, Murdoch did what he has always done: made sure he had maximum influence with the new president.

I have to talk to God’s right hand man, tomorrow.

Lee Atwater [Republican National Committee Chairman] saw politics as a cutthroat game and didn't mind holding the blade.

You know George M. Steinbrenner III is the center of all evil in the universe.

I'm not a kingmaker.

Trump was always a poster boy of the selfish, egomaniacal, ignorant, bragging, cruel rich kid, whose mirror was the sleazy pages of Rupert Murdoch's 'New York Post.' Trump's oxygen was the leaked item, without which he would die the suffocating death of being shown to a bad table.

John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich.

Tom Daschle is one of the smartest guys in Washington.