Quotessence
Home / Topics / Political Campaigns Quotes

Political Campaigns Quotes

Browse 12 quotes about Political Campaigns.

Political Campaigns Quotes

“Walt Trowbridge conducted his campaign as placidly as though he were certain to win. He did not spare himself, but he did not moan over the Forgotten Men (he'd been one himself, as a youngster, and didn't think it was so bad!) nor become hysterical at a private bar in a scarlet-and-silver special tram. Quietly, steadfastly, speaking on the radio and in a few great halls, he explained that he did advocate an enormously improved distribution of wealth, but that it must be achieved by steady digging and not by dynamite that would destroy more than it excavated. He wasn't particularly thrilling. Economics rarely are, except when they have been dramatized by a Bishop, staged and lighted by a Sarason, and passionately played by a Buzz Windrip with rapier and blue satin tights.”

PoliticsCampaignsAmerican PoliticsComplacencyPolitical Campaigns
Author:Sinclair Lewis
Create image

“What is it like to be made vice-president? On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world. It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land.... It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself.”

American PoliticsVice PresidentPolitical Campaigns
Book:Crooked
Create image

“If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we're back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.”

GovernmentPoliticsWealthyPolitical PartiesRepublicansDemocratsCampaign FinanceGilded AgeRobber BaronsDonationsPolitical CampaignsU SFund Raising
Author:David Axelrod
Create image

“Efforts by Democrats to portray Jackson as 'manly' and for the 'common man' were apparently more effective than were the campaign tactics of Adams’s supporters, who attempted to depict Jackson as violent, unjust, a paramour, and even a poor speller. It is quite possible that this anti-Jackson propaganda actually reinforced the positive image of Jackson as a masculine commoner—especially when contrasted with that of Adams, whom the Democrats depicted as an over-refined aristocrat.”

PoliticsHistoryCampaignsElectionsGraphic DesignPolitical Campaigns
Author:Steven A. Seidman
Create image

“Fillmore lost his party’s nomination the next year to yet another military hero, General Winfield 'Old Fuss and Feathers' Scott, an anti-slavery candidate who then lost the election to General Franklin Pierce (whose party’s slogan was 'We Polked you in 1844; we shall Pierce you in 1852').”

PoliticsHistoryCampaignsElectionsGraphic DesignPolitical Campaigns
Book:Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History
Create image

“In the years that followed the Harrison campaign, many candidates—from Colonel James 'Young Hickory' Polk in 1844 to Lieutenant John Kerry in 2004—had their 'humble origins' and/or 'war leadership' highlighted in political material. Often coupled with these tactics was a corollary, to create an image of the opposition candidate that was highly negative—from John Adams as a 'monarchist' to John Kerry as a 'flip-flopping, windsurfing elitist.”

PoliticsHistoryCampaignsElectionsGraphic DesignPolitical Campaigns
Book:Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History
Create image

“Yet, some things do not change. Overall, designers have stayed with techniques that work—in different countries and historical periods. Flagg’s 'I Want You for U.S. Army' design in World War I, with 'Uncle Sam' looking directly at the viewer and pointing a finger at him, was derived from a British poster produced three years earlier; in the British poster, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener is pointing a finger at British males, with the words 'Wants You, Join Your Country’s Army! God Save The King.' Other countries—Italy, Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, France, the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Red Army in Russia, and later, the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War—designed similar posters. The British applied the same design idea in World War II, featuring Prime Minister Winston Churchill, instead of Kitchener, in the same pose; the U.S. Democratic Party resurrected Flagg’s Uncle Sam image, including it in an election poster for Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the decades that followed, however, anti-war protest groups issued satires of Flagg’s 'I Want You' poster, with 'Uncle Sam' in a variety of poses: pointing a gun at the audience; making the 'peace sign,' bandaged and accompanied by the slogan 'I Want Out'; as a skeleton, with a target superimposed on him; and with the 'bad breath' of airplanes dropping bombs on houses in his mouth.”

PoliticsHistoryCampaignsElectionsGraphic DesignPolitical Campaigns
Book:Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History
Create image

“Widely hailed as the most popular director of Central Intelligence since Allen Dulles, Bush had enormous support within the Agency. As the campaign got under way, Reagan-Bush posters appeared all over CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, many cut in the middle with only the right side, the Bush side, on display.”

PoliticsCiaDeep StateBushHistory PoliticsGeorge H W BushPolitical CampaignsEspionage CultureLangley
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
Create image

“James Ed smiled. “We should start a cuddling movement. Cuddling would solve most of the world’s problems. I can just see our bumper stickers. Have you cuddled today?”

DeterminationDebateAccountabilityGovernanceSchool SystemGrassrootsLobbyingPolitical CampaignsChange AgentsTeaching Practices
Book:James Ed Hoskins and the One-Room Schoolhouse: The Unprosecuted Crime Against Children
Create image

“According to her [Erica Chenoweth's] data, “no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.” Further, she notes, “Every single campaign that did surpass that 3.5 percent threshold was a nonviolent one. In fact, campaigns that relied solely on nonviolent methods were on average four times larger than the average violent campaign. And they were often much more representative in terms of gender, age, race, political party, class, and urban-rural distinctions.”

Nonviolent ResistanceNonviolent Conflict ResolutionPolitical ParticipationPolitical CampaignsCivil ResistanceErica Chenoweth
Book:The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People
Create image