7 Wilfrid Sheed Quotes on Politics

Wilfrid Sheed quotes on politics

10. The desire not to destroy the palace but to move into it oneself has always been the occupational curse of revolutionaries.

12. For now, I'm supposing that all movements are equal, which they're not, except in this respect: that none of them gives a damn about artists beyond their immediate utility. Good movements will use a writer just as ruthlessly as bad ones; since they all fancy they have better things to do than worry about one man's artistic survival.

15. I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the 'typical liberal' - as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns.

34. Chicago 1968 taught one how close any civilized country is to berserkness at all times; also how terrorism, even silly terrorism, strengthens the cops more than anyone. Yet already this European-style history lesson has been watered down by consensus into something crazy we did in the sixties, just as we 'did' McCarthyism in the fifties. As if a nation changes its nature completely every ten years; as if social forces were as evanescent as hula hoops or skateboards, instead of as remorseless as glaciers.

35. As you approach the presidency, no one seems worthy of it, since it wasn't designed for a human in the first place.

39. Not that there weren't real communists in the labor unions, and real spies in Washington, but these had nothing to do with the show that was being put on for us, which seemed entirely designed to Make Us Take This Thing Seriously. From abroad, where I was for much of the time, it looked as if the United States were trying to act like a superpower by holding its very own show trials.

47. Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.