Mark Shields Quotes

The single worst campaign slogan I have ever heard, is Hillary's Clinton, "I'm with her," it means nothing. It absolutely means nothing to anybody. I mean, it's about appealing - and it says nothing about anybody's life, about the country.

Now Republicans are a more interventionist party than they have been at any time since George W. Bush left office.

Richard Nixon said it best. It makes no difference whether they hold your nose or whether they go would through a wall to vote for you. It counts the same with the X.

Lee Atwater,[Ronald] Reagan's strategist, had no patience for CPAC, because he thought they were sort of wild and immature, basically.

There is always strength in numbers. The more individuals or organizations that you can rally to your cause, the better.

From 1976, Judy to 1996, we had six presidential elections. And it was run under the Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1974. In all six of them, every candidate agreed to limits of what he could collect in contributions and what he could spend in seeking a nomination. And they all abided by it.

I think she [Hillary Clinton] would be far superior to President [Barack] Obama, who is basically remote, aloof and not involved with - he doesn't deal with members of Congress.

Donald Trump is sounding the same theme he has sounded since May or June of 2015.

Mitt Romney looks like a secretary of state. He looks like the chancellor of the exchequer.

Presidential trust is something, that's perishable and it's precious. And once a president loses it, it's not a question of whether it's conflict of interests laws or there aren't conflict of interests laws.

The measure of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, but whether, as Franklin Roosevelt said, we provide enough for those who have too little.

American education will be determined by the quality of American public education, and that's public schools that are available.

John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.

Russia is a country that has supported, propped up the worst of anti-democratic regimes in the Middle East, that has practiced - mistreated its own press, mistreated its own civil society, and economic intimidation of its neighbors, including invasion of its neighbors.I mean, this is the one country on the face of the earth with the capacity to obliterate the United States.

Big money buys access in Washington, and access purchases influence. It is as simple as that. And they have basically given a green light, a further green light, after Citizens United, to the biggest money to have the bigger voice in our politics, and to sound out and drown out the voice of just ordinary citizens.

The uncritically admiring supporters and friends of the prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu], in whose ranks I certainly don't include David [Brooks], but include Charles Krauthammer, the columnist, and Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, insist on comparing him to the incomparable leader of the British forces in country in part of - during World War II.

Since the election, since the formation of a government, the death in Iraq has increased. The United States stands by, helpless to do anything about it. That's the reality, not George Bush's revisionist history!

If you're on the other side from me, you're not simply wrong or ill-informed or mistaken. We don't share the same country, the same values. You may not be the same kind of an American I am.

I think part of Donald Trump's appeal is that he's a guy that does cut corners, that he's the guy that does get deals and maybe does break a speed limit. I think there was sort of a roguish, rascally, but I get things done even if I break the rules.

It's not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own, living their entire lives in the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of the parents every single day.

Benjamin Netanyahu is no Winston Churchill. Whatever else he, is he's not a Winston Churchill. He basically violated the great rule, which is it's better to mislead the people and to lose an election than to mislead the people and win an election.

There's no question that there's been a breach in the trust between urban - especially urban community, African-American and minority communities and the police in major American cities.

I think Donald Trump is not going to be impeached [in a ] month. Let's not close out possibilities.I do think that what's happening is great and that people are active and people are just involved in the democratic process.

Every Republican candidate in the country is going to be asked whether in a debate or where else, by opponents or by the press, do you consider Donald Trump to be an appropriate role model for the children of our state? And it just - as far as the women's vote reported on in Georgia, it makes it so, not simply difficult. It makes it almost impossible for somebody with self-respect, who has a mother or sister or a daughter, somebody like this in Abraham Lincoln's chair.

[Donald Trump] stood up and he said, you finally have a president, you finally have a president. I am the future.And what did he get? Hosannas and huzzahs and genuflection. It was a total takeover of the conservative movement.

Americans don't like powerful figures who punch down, that is, who pick on someone less powerful and less able to speak for themselves than they are.

The other thing that has changed - and this is more detailed to CPAC than the general Republican Party - is they have always been an outsider, Ann Coulter, sort of protest style, a little ruder than most Republicans. And this goes back all the way to [Ronald] Reagan.

That's what the conservative movement has become, is basically an annex of the [Donald] Trump campaign.

Health care, it's going to be political. It's going to be, let's say, the confluence of the politics and the messy implementation.

Everyone has to take Donald Trump seriously, and I think that's what we're seeing.

It's interesting how identity politics and Ann Coulter-style tactics have now blossomed. But they were always there in CPAC.

Ronald Reagan four times accepted the limits in contributions of what he could take, what he could spend, and the public funding for the general elections. So I just think the idea that it didn't work, and didn't work - it did work. It worked brilliantly.

Let's give the president some due here. They had a mess, and he fixed it, and they mobilized a lot of authority, and they did it.

When you think of pristine preservation of America, you immediately think of Tulsa and Oklahoma.

In the past, in order to continue as a candidate, a serious candidate, you had to be in the top three finishes in Iowa. You had to be in the top two out of New Hampshire. All our presidents elected in the past half-century finished either first or second in New Hampshire and in the top three in Iowa. That changed with the Citizens United, when we gave unlimited amounts of money.

[The Republicans] looked at basically the failed wars and they said, oh, this, us being the policeman of the world, that is not working.

The Republicans are looking at a country that is going to be a majority minority country in just over a generation. And they are an increasingly white party.

[Donald] Trump, he - you know, buy American, buy American, anti-free trade, and got big cheers. They're waving Russian flags, probably partly as a joke. But, still, the party has become an ethnic nationalist party.

White working-class voters or working-class voters have felt abandoned, have felt, in many senses, disparaged by the political leadership of America.

Hillary Clinton has emphasized that she is afflicted with or possessed of the responsibility gene.

But the people at home if we're doing a town meeting or a town format. You have to answer the question that is asked. And what people at home are gauging how does this candidate respond to the questioner? Do they show respect to the questioner? Do they try to understand why the questioner is asking that? Do they respond to the question? Is there a human connection between the two? It's where Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012. He lost the voters on who was a stronger leader, who had a vision for the future, but on who cares about people like me, he trounced Mitt Romney.

Russia today is nothing but a propaganda arm.

It's tempting to remember that the Tea Party had a peak and then the Republican Party establishment sort of beat it back down. And so these things are won in a day.

Donald Trump is writing a different theme, which is it's midnight in America and that things are bad, and they're bleak, and they're gloomy and they're doomy, and the only thing that is going to save you is someone with the authority and power of somebody like me.

[Hillary] Clinton is much more embracing of the global economy and the international world order. [Ben] Sanders and [Scott] Warren are much less so.

Donald Trump has taken over the Republican Party. He's transformed the Republican Party.

Whether it's her [ Hillary Clinton] guarded privacy or whatever else, I mean, there has got to be some sense that this is a human being that I can identify.

I do think what the Tea Party also had was Obamacare and the unpopularity of that, at least at the time. And so whether there is something that is equally unpopular and equally galvanizing that is almost self-destructive from the administration, that's another factor that we will wait and see.