A Quote by Fletcher Knebel

Statesmanship is harder than politics. Politics is the art of getting along with people, whereas statesmanship is the art of getting along with politicians.

Fletcher Knebel

Quote Topics

Along Art Getting Getting Along Harder People Politicians Politics Statesmanship Than Whereas

Quote Author

Fletcher Knebel
American - Author
October 1, 1911 - February 26, 1993

Getting along with the gang in one place is not any harder than getting along in another. It depends about 98 percent on your own behavior.

Norman Vincent Peale

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.

Walter Lippmann

War can be prevented only by broad-minded statesmanship - a statesmanship that understands how to enlist people's interests in a leading cause.

Ellen Key

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

True statesmanship is the art of changing a nation from what it is into what it ought to be.

William Rounseville Alger

The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

Politics is a part of life and art is about life. It doesn't mean that all the art has to be about politics - in fact, heaven forbid. But politics is a totally legitimate area of focus for any art, whether it's painting or songwriting or anything else, as much as sex is, as much as spirituality is, as much as any other behavior of people is.

Bruce Cockburn

Ninety percent of the art of living consists of getting along with people you cannot stand.

Samuel Goldwyn

Conservatives really don't believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don't tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do.

P. J. O'Rourke

Art goes beyond politics. Even if there are writers who are involved in politics, eventually, in one or two centuries, it's not their politics which is going to count, but the fact of having given life to feelings, of having created characters and made a living work of art.

Eugene Ionesco

I was much further along as a poet than as a songwriter, but the songs were getting more attention. They were doing what art is supposed to do, mixing it up with people.

David Berman

My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall. Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think art is elite or mysterious. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention.

Ai Weiwei

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

James Russell Lowell

As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art. More often than not political art fails as politics, and all too often it fails as art. To reach its fullest power, to be most moving and most fully useful to us, art must be itself.

John Luther Adams

I write some art criticism, and one thing that's clear to me is that politics is fashionable in the American art world in a way it maybe isn't in American fiction. Your work of art becomes fashionable the moment it has some kind of political commentary. I think this has its dangers - the equation between fashion, politics, and art is problematic for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, the notion of politics as being de rigueur in the world of fiction is almost unthinkable. In fiction in America at the moment, the escape into whimsy is far more prevalent than the political.