What we do now, on the other hand...Don't think that I'm crazy about this kind of politics. It's no accident that I've done everything to keep my sons out of it, and so far I've succeeded. After independence I retired immediately from politics.
I came into politics by accident. I may go out of politics by accident.
We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.
The politics of personal destruction, the politics of division, the politics of fear, it's all there. It helps you to define the politics of moderation - the politics of democratic respect, the politics of hope - more clearly.
My sons...I was crazy about my sons and I think I've done a super job in bringing them up.
My family was entirely political, all the time, on the left. The opposite of that is not to be political on the right. It's trying not to be - politics is not everything. There's life other than politics. Politics intrudes.
I was very interested in politics in college and was heading to be a lawyer. I have a degree in economics and I was interested in it. I hadn't really gotten super serious about it and I'd done a lot of student politics in high school. I really think it would be interesting and fun and challenging to go into politics.
Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.
The attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, than politics has in fact become totalitarian.
I had no intention of getting back into politics. I was teaching at Bowdoin and happily retired from politics.
I full well realize that politics is a rough and tumble business, but politics should not be reduced to lobbing partisan hand grenades. Politics is not war. Terrorism is.
My two interests are spirituality and politics. I would mesh them in some way; maybe try to figure out the politics of spirituality, or the spirituality of politics. Or maybe come up with this really crazy naive solution for the end of civilization.
It's now our responsibility to prove to ourselves, to other nations, and especially to our children and our grandchildren, that politics is full of fun; politics has some wisdom. Politics is freedom.
In terms of talking about what our politics has become, it now seems as if Barack Obama is starting to stand outside of it a little bit and critique what our politics has become. And I think he sees himself as a useful critic that way saying that it's not only become dishonest, he said, but now we have a selective sorting of the facts and our politics has become self-defeating.
We're very good at talking about the individual in American politics and excellent at talking about the government. But we have little ability to even acknowledge everything that exists in the middle, and given how influential politics is on every other part of our life, I think that failure of discourse is pretty corrosive to our overall culture.
Politics is not predictions and politics is not observations. Politics is what we do. Politics is what we do, politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope for and what we dare to imagine.
I don't think I'd really talked about politics - governmental politics specifically - very often, and it was a bit of a stretch for me to do so for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I'm not that well-versed or educated in politics.