Thomas Mann Quotes (117 Quotes)

You don't keep real confidence in the economy when you hear that the Social Security system is going broke. Americans weren't persuaded by his solution. So we got a crisis without a solution.

The obvious missing potential mistake is George Bush's decision to wage war in Iraq.

The political outcome of this battle will depend on who succeeds in defining the terms of the debate.

The problem will be finding floor time, especially in the Senate, where Supreme Court nominations, appropriations bills, (budget) reconciliation, and post-KatrinaRita measures leave little time for anything else, ... Steroids are likely to carry over to next year.

If those train wrecks and if that gamesmanship is being driven by broad political forces, narrow margins in the House and the Senate, divided party government, difficult decisions that have to be made, genuine differences that exist, mobilization of interest groups if all of those things are true, you are going to find vehicles to have those fights, whether you have a two-year budget cycle or not.

I think personal experiences make a huge difference on issues like this. The promise of breakthroughs in research (on) Parkinson's disease or juvenile diabetes are sufficient for some pro-life politicians to support public funding of stem cell research.

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

Bush inherited a bitterly partisanship atmosphere in Washington but governed and campaigned in a fashion that greatly exacerbated it. He is now partly responsible for that tone, and nothing in his State of the Union speech leads me to believe it will change in the months before the November elections.

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state

The man is amazing. He is obviously strong and hardy and able and intelligent.

His background, record and silence on a number of questions spoke volumes about his likely performance on the court.

From the hearing in the Supreme Court on the Clinton v. Jones case, to the extraordinary partnership associated with Speaker Gingrich's ethics case, I think all of that has also reduced the feeling of new beginning and possibility.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

It was not quite the finale that the president and the Republican leadership had in mind.

Secret ballots are very different from public votes.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

I think the early signs are that it is succeeding in firming up his base. The tough anti-terrorism rhetoric and making an affirmative case for Iraq has helped stem the decline in support among Republicans. It remains to be seen if it can have an impact on Democrats and Independents in the long run, but he has clearly made a decision to return to the one issue that has bolstered his presidency from beginning 911.

I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Literature. . . is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

It's not a pretty sight up on Capitol Hill these days. It's unusual to get so many major events packed in a single week. Of course, that wasn't the plan.

Do you know how many times campaign-finance reform failed before final passage in 2002 Many times.

Separation would likely do more harm than good for congressional Republicans. They need to try to rehabilitate the president's political standing, which will have a large bearing on the size of their seat loss in 2006.

Republicans who had doubts about elements of the president's tax and spending programs were willing to play ball in the interests of advancing the Republican cause. Now that the president is in serious political trouble, they're more inclined to make some independent judgments.

Everything is politics.

Time has no divisions to mark its passing. There is never a thunderstorm to announce the beginning of a new month or year.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.

The State of the Union is one of those events that have symbolic importance for the country. It is an occasion of pomp and tradition. It involves a nationally televised audience. It is an opportunity for the president to try to shape the policy-making agenda, to influence public opinion.

As long as the proposal is structured so the ultimate decision regarding actions taken by the House or Congress against members is retained by members themselves I don't think there's any constitutional problem with that at all.

For the myth is the foundation of life it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

He hasn't been in a position for some time to press successfully most of the controversial issues on which the country is divided, and there's substantial opposition in Washington. We saw that on Social Security reform. We're likely to see it on immigration reform. There are enormous obstacles in the proposal to make the tax cuts permanent.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skeptics, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which t

Frankly, this goes well beyond his conservative base. The problem to most Americans across parties is that it goes to a matter of competence, and reinforces the reaction they had after Hurricane Katrina.

It's amazing what a 38 job approval rating will do. Republicans are terrified that they're going to lose their majority.

On every other aspect of his agenda, he is pretty close to dead in the water. This is one area of promise for him.

They feel emboldened in a way that they weren't after 9-11. They see that their criticisms help shape public opinion and they are emboldened by seeing erosion in the Republican Party unity.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.

The juxtaposition of the spending cuts and tax cuts can prove really quite damaging to the Republican Party. The more they are held up together, the more difficult it becomes to make the sale for the Republicans.

The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.

I think was Harry Truman who said, 'If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic,' ... The idea that somehow a Democratic majority is harmful for the economy strikes me as fanciful. It's financial fiction.