Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think 'first woman president.' We think—for example—'first ex-co-president' or 'first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent' or 'first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband's perjury rap.

An ideal scandal is the one that reveals to us what our leaders really think of us; the fools they take us to be and the ease with which they get away with things.

In my own not-all-that-humble opinion, duping the hicks is a degree or two worse than condescending to them.

At least he had some of the right enemies, even if he didn’t do enough to earn them.

The highest art in low politics is to be able to induce the masses to invest their own sense of dignity in yours. Then, if you are exposed as a fraud, they will be exposed as credulous: a conclusion they approach with a natural human reluctance.

Quarrels on the left have a tendency to become miniature treason trials, replete with all kinds of denunciation. There’s a general tendency—not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with them—to believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one.

Only the liberals and soft-leftists persist in agonizing as they give their (actually unqualified) loyalty, in advance, to people who publicly spit on them. I don’t know whether the masochist or the sadist commits the greater evil, but I do know that you can’t have one without the other.

Orwell was interested above all not in the rationalizations of the dominant, but in the excuses and whimperings of the submissive.

The values of solidarity, collectivism, and internationalism are not so much desirable as they are actually mandated by nature and reality itself.