A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.
Mary McCarthyThe things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.
Mary McCarthyThe immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof
Mary McCarthyAnybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.
Mary McCarthy