Top 228 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Shields - Page 2

My church [Catholisism] is hurting from arrogance and from its indifference to the suffering of children that were abused and the inclination of the leadership to protect the institution, rather than the children.

Sometimes, you just let the country have its way, and you don't try to determine the shape of the country. You sort of modestly step back and let the country figure out what it believes.

Mitt Romney looks like a secretary of state. He looks like the chancellor of the exchequer.

There are people who know Hillary Clinton who tell wonderful stories about her, how likable she is, how funny she is; 99 percent of American people don't - have never seen that side of her.

The Republicans, they are in the danger of rooting for the country to fail. They look bad that way, I mean, and I want to say to them, cheer up, Republicans. Eventually, things will get worse.

As long as Republicans won't - won't raise taxes and as long as Democrats won't in any way make entitlements based on need, rather than just across the board, I really think that we're doomed to this deadlock.

[In politics] when A goes after B and there's a C, and D and a Q all lined up there, you have no idea who's going to be the beneficiary.

Hillary Clinton has emphasized that she is afflicted with or possessed of the responsibility gene.

Being a party chair, you really have a chance to make a difference. but what the Democrats have to do is recognize and accept the fact that they're at their lowest point [in 2017] since 1928 in the United States House of Representatives and their lowest point since 1925 in states.

People in the White House work hard, whatever administration. They get rewarded in psychic income, a sense that they are involved in something bigger than themselves, that it's important.

The uncritically admiring supporters and friends of the prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu], in whose ranks I certainly don't include David [Brooks], but include Charles Krauthammer, the columnist, and Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, insist on comparing him to the incomparable leader of the British forces in country in part of - during World War II.

[Donald Trump] stood up and he said, you finally have a president, you finally have a president. I am the future.And what did he get? Hosannas and huzzahs and genuflection. It was a total takeover of the conservative movement.

Now the Republicans have a very low-scale, by economic standards, base. Donald Trump has.

I'm not sure Betsy DeVos has ever spent a day in a public school. And I don't - I'm pretty sure Donald Trump hasn't.

All politics is personal with President Trump. And that carries with it great, great problems.

Now Republicans are a more interventionist party than they have been at any time since George W. Bush left office.

That's what the conservative movement has become, is basically an annex of the [Donald] Trump campaign.

Tim Kaine kind of gives the warmer, human face of the Democrats.

Americans don't like powerful figures who punch down, that is, who pick on someone less powerful and less able to speak for themselves than they are.

There is no tougher job in America than being a cop on the beat in a major city in this country, big and brawling.

Health care, it's going to be political. It's going to be, let's say, the confluence of the politics and the messy implementation.

The tough thing about a campaign being over is, you lose your enemy.

In a strange way, Hillary Clinton was helped and victimized by Barack and Michelle Obama.Michelle Obama was probably better than Barack Obama, if you think about it.Her speech is a masterful, masterful speech. And she delivered it in a persuasively conversational tone.

Donald Trump manages to personalize everything. He brings chaos. He will not admit that he's ever made a mistake, that he's ever been wrong.

Critics of Donald Trump take him literally, but not seriously. His supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

It's both strategic, to get people's minds off other things, and to pick an internal enemy. It's part of [Donald Trump's] psychodynamics to always care about his press coverage intensely. He's more interested in that than anything else.

Donald Trump defies gravity. And so I guess he has to be Donald Trump. It's gotten him so far.

Stronger together is, I think, a preposition and a comparative adjective, but it's not really an action verb or what it is.

But the people at home if we're doing a town meeting or a town format. You have to answer the question that is asked. And what people at home are gauging how does this candidate respond to the questioner? Do they show respect to the questioner? Do they try to understand why the questioner is asking that? Do they respond to the question? Is there a human connection between the two? It's where Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012. He lost the voters on who was a stronger leader, who had a vision for the future, but on who cares about people like me, he trounced Mitt Romney.

[The Republicans] looked at basically the failed wars and they said, oh, this, us being the policeman of the world, that is not working.

[Donald] Trump, he - you know, buy American, buy American, anti-free trade, and got big cheers. They're waving Russian flags, probably partly as a joke. But, still, the party has become an ethnic nationalist party.

Tim Kaine didn't come across authentic. It wasn't good. And it was - it just really - I think, for short-term benefit, I think the Democrats tarnished the brand, which is an awfully good brand.

One of the first things every press secretary assures you is, the boss has a wonderful sense of humor, because not to have a sense of humor is considered flagrantly un-American.

Something really serious has shifted in the minds of Republicans and certainly others.

If you're on the other side from me, you're not simply wrong or ill-informed or mistaken. We don't share the same country, the same values. You may not be the same kind of an American I am.

I do look upon the secretary of education's primary responsibility as the quality of education that - and improving the education that every child in American public schools receives.

Everyone has to take Donald Trump seriously, and I think that's what we're seeing.

Russia is a country that has supported, propped up the worst of anti-democratic regimes in the Middle East, that has practiced - mistreated its own press, mistreated its own civil society, and economic intimidation of its neighbors, including invasion of its neighbors.I mean, this is the one country on the face of the earth with the capacity to obliterate the United States.

There is a cleavage and a divide in America like I have never seen before.

Presidential trust is something, that's perishable and it's precious. And once a president loses it, it's not a question of whether it's conflict of interests laws or there aren't conflict of interests laws.

Campaigns are fun. Campaigns are police escorts, they're airplanes, they're crowds, they're balloons, they're bands, a lot of fun. You speak in vague generalities. You get applause for slogans. And then governing comes. And governing is tedious and it's difficult an it's time-consuming and it demands your attention. And policy isn't vague generalities. It's specifics and it's based on knowledge.

If an abduction is reported, it is dealt with in the same way as a kidnap.

I'm sure little Marco [Rubio] didn't think it would stick. I'm sure crooked Hillary [Clinton] didn't think it would stick. These labels do have a certain power to them. And so we will see how it plays out.

90 percent of American schoolchildren are in public schools. And the emphasis on private schools and charter schools and parochial schools is not unimportant.

The problem is that what Donald Trump said, if you take it literally now, is cause for anxiety and nervousness.

I do think, over the last years, a lot of Republicans have decided it's not working, what the party believed in, free trade, global capitalism, open borders.

I think Hillary Clinton - first of all, it's a great victory, acknowledge it. She has made history.

Every Republican candidate in the country is going to be asked whether in a debate or where else, by opponents or by the press, do you consider Donald Trump to be an appropriate role model for the children of our state? And it just - as far as the women's vote reported on in Georgia, it makes it so, not simply difficult. It makes it almost impossible for somebody with self-respect, who has a mother or sister or a daughter, somebody like this in Abraham Lincoln's chair.

The single worst campaign slogan I have ever heard, is Hillary's Clinton, "I'm with her," it means nothing. It absolutely means nothing to anybody. I mean, it's about appealing - and it says nothing about anybody's life, about the country.

It's interesting how identity politics and Ann Coulter-style tactics have now blossomed. But they were always there in CPAC.

There is always strength in numbers

The president has to have the trust, earn the trust, maintain the trust of people in order to lead. And there's nothing that will lose it quicker than a sense that he's in it for a quick buck.

The charter school is a possibility, an alternative in certain circumstances, but not in most, and not in most places, and not - most parents don't have either the time, the inclination or the aptitude to sit and go through sifting what school and what is available and what the options are.

The Republicans have, with some pride - George W. Bush won the White House by promising to restore dignity to the Oval Office. And they were or presented themselves as the family - the party of family values.

Once I accuse you of racist, I have demonized you, and it means any future collaboration, cooperation between us is a sign of my moral deficiency, if I would deal with someone like that. It's a terrible thing to do.

I think the Democrats did a terrible disservice, the Hillary Clinton campaign did, to Tim Kaine. Tim Kaine had the earned reputation of being one of the most respected and well-liked, and not cheap partisan members of the United States Senate. And they turned him into an attack dog.

Richard Nixon said it best. It makes no difference whether they hold your nose or whether they go would through a wall to vote for you. It counts the same with the X.

Steve Bannon went to the Conservative Political Action Conference and he said that there was a very important historical turning point, getting rid of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And the Republican Party has stood for that for as long as I have been alive.

Mitt Romney was the man who stood up to Donald Trump early, hard, never wavered.

Hillary Clinton, at the end of the debate, what you want viewers to say, yes, she's smart, she's knowledgeable, but she's not a bad egg, you know? Not a bad egg is a pretty high compliment in American politics, given the toxic atmosphere in which we currently dwell.