A Quote by Matthew Parris
Nothing corrupts a politician quite as much as friendship. Good politicians don't bribe; they make us like them.
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Life itself has so much politics, why should I make it my profession? I'm just a politician's son, not a politician myself. Two politicians, that's my dad and elder brother, in the family are enough. I'm happy doing my own stuff in Bollywood.
If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.
What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
I don't see Sarah Palin suddenly spilling over to a wider group where suddenly they go, "Wait a minute, I've heard her message, and now I'm beginning..." It's not expanding it. A politician that doesn't expand from the base is not a good politician. So I disagree with all the talking heads that go "Well, she's a very good politician." She's not! Good politicians expand, and she doesn't.
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
Perfect friendship puts us under the necessity of being virtuous. As it can only be preserved among estimable persons, it forces us to resemble them. You find in friendship the surety of good counsel, the emulation of good example, sympathy in our griefs, succor in our distress.
The point is, is that when you elect a politician, it has nothing to do with their personality. Politicians perform a function, a role in government. And the role of city government is not one that serves the people, unless the people make them do what the people want.
I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.
I think that the friendship that women share is so powerful. In fact, there's nothing quite like it. People talk about mother-child bonds, but I would argue that female friendship bond is also in a league unto its own.
Anybody who was a politician at one stage - when they were at the "I'd like to be a train driver" stage of their lives - must also have thought: "I'd like to make the world a better place if possible." So, I think that's why most politicians go into it. They don't want to take over the world and most go into it for good reasons and then, presumably, are beset by endless things stopping them from following their natural inclination to do the right thing.
It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.
Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.
If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
The average politician was crooked. That was my ambition, to be a crooked politician. I'd see them in these restaurants, and they'd all hold these conferences. I'd see politicians who were supposed to be on opposite sides of issues all together at one table.
What was I qualified to do to make a living? Nothing. You don't need qualifications as an actor or a politician. And I didn't want to be a politician.
I reiterate my proposal of creating life sentences for politicians who make deals with organized criminals. They deserve the maximum penalty because a politician that makes deals with criminals - I've said it, and I repeat it - is no longer a politician but just another 'capo.'
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