Chris Matthews > Quotes

“He's cutting the heart out of the American dream to own a home and have a good job ... and still he's popular

Tip O'Neill on Ronald Reagan”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“He's a beautiful man, but I'm sorry he doesn't agree with my political philosophy

Tip O'Neill on Ronald Reagan”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“It was his detachment that saved us. Another man would have reacted with force to the Soviet treachery. He would have shared the righteousness of the cause, been stirred to attack by the saber rattling. Jack resisted. He was not moved by the emotion of other around him. He knew his course and stayed to it. Thank God. The boy who had read alone of history's heroes was now safely on of them. He had done it not winning a war, but by averting one far more horrible than any leader in the past could have imagined.”
― Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

“It's not such a bad idea, at any time, to be seen as FIGHTING, especially when you might just win.”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. . . . And it’s not sufficient just being against, just saying, ‘Well, I don’t think I like the way things are going.’ We have a responsibility to offer an alternative.”
― Chris Matthews, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit

“In politics, nothing good ever comes from the unexpected.”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“The author, at the time a Carter speechwriter in the 1980 campaign, showed visible distress at his boss's performance and was warned by a friend in the traveling press, lest he become the story.”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“The author attributes part of the Carter-Reagan divide to their respective attitudes toward the city from which they governed. Carter was deeply suspicious of its coziness. Reagan intended to enjoy his temporary home even while delivering it from its reigning ideology.”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“He who learns must suffer. Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
― Chris Matthews, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit

“up”
― Chris Matthews, Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

“In politics there is a large difference between loosing and being defeated.”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“In aiming high and refusing to be satisfied with even the governor's job- when what he wanted was to be a senator- Jack was showing how much his ambitions paralleled his father's. Joe Kennedy refused to settle for what his fellow Boston Irish regarded as good enough achievement, an upper-middle-class level of success. Joe wanted more- and allowed nothing to stand in his way. In his own words: "For the Kennedys, it's either the castle or the outhouse." p122”
― Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

“Don’t have a reputation for being a nice guy—that won’t do you any good

Muskie was the best of them all, the absolute best, because nobody wanted to tangle with the guy. You know, why tangle with the guy? Why ruin your day? A bad temper is a very powerful political tool because most people don’t like confrontation.”
― Chris Matthews

“As he had all his life, Jack found refuge from his health worries in the power of words and ideas. Reading remained his salvation, and not just the daily newspapers that are the daily fare of most politicians. p108”
― Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

“Each man had come to know the other's caricature as a lie.”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve in the streets of India, a former prime minister (Patrice Lumumba) is summarily executed in the Congo, intellectuals go to jail in Russia, and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia: wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world. They are differing evils; but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the suffering of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings around the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.”
― Chris Matthews, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit

“It won a commitment from the Soviet leader to take no action that would influence the 1962 congressional elections. Both the White House and the Kremlin recognized that any instance of Soviet aggression could only play into the hands of the more hawkish Republicans.”
― Chris Matthews, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit

“He was making the inevitable pivot from critic to manager.”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“Staffers tend to mimic their bosses, to take their key from them.”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“The author contrasts leadership styles he describes as wholesale and retail. The whole sale leader rallies groups to an overriding vision, and to him individuals are interchangeable. The retail leader knows everyone's details and uses personal touches to motivate.”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“The author defines professionalism as exemplified by his subjects in their mutual unwillingness to take expected opposition personally. They would not allow grudges to get in the way of more important business.”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“the Senate in 1958. He was the”
― Chris Matthews, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit

“Kennedy picked Clark Clifford, who’d been President Truman’s counselor, to be his liaison with the outgoing Eisenhower staff. An astute observer of men and power, Clifford recognized early on John Kennedy’s ability to detach himself from himself. You’d see him sitting at meetings, Clifford once told me, and you could almost imagine JFK’s spirit assuming a form of its own and rising up, the better to look down on the group and assess its various members’ motives and agendas. It was the same uncanny detachment Chuck Spalding had seen in Jack on his wedding day.”
― Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

“Historically, the coupling of president and Speaker has been a tricky one that encourages a choreography both quick-footed and wary”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“The Russian people were just like us. They were victims of their own government. Ronald Reagan”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“My priority is to see that some people don’t suffer for the good of others.”
― Chris Matthews, Chris Matthews Biographies E-book Boxed Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, and Kennedy & Nixon

“He'd made a name for himself out there in the world beyond not just in spite of the distinctly unfashionable persona he presented, but, perhaps, BECAUSE of it.”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

“O’Neill was perceptive enough to understand the country had a new leader that it wanted to believe in. After the tragedy of Dallas, after the quicksand of Vietnam, the scandal of Watergate, and the “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, it needed one.”
― Chris Matthews, Chris Matthews Biographies E-book Boxed Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, and Kennedy & Nixon

“typewriter.”
― Chris Matthews, Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

“and gentlemen,”
― Chris Matthews, Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American