Quotes by Thomas Mann

• Further-more, partisan attachments powerfully shape political perceptions, beliefs and values, and incumbents enjoy advantages well beyond the way in which their districts are configured.
• All of this suggests that while citizens became more comfortable with President Bush after September 11 and thought him to have the requisite leadership skills, they continue to harbor doubts about his priorities, loyalties, interests, and policies.
• Votes in federal elections are cast and counted in a highly decentralized and variable fashion, with no uniform ballots and few national standards.
• The public's evaluation of the job George W. Bush is doing as president changed dramatically as a result of the horrific attacks of September 11 and his response in leading the country on a campaign against terrorism.
• The increase in straight-ticket party voting in recent years means that competitive congressional races can tip one way or the other depending on the showing of the candidates at the top of the ticket.
• Second, the President's popularity has not translated into increased support for the Republican party or for the policies and approaches on domestic policy championed by the President.
• Responsibility for overseeing the implementation of election law typically resides with partisan officials, many with public stakes in the election outcome.
• Redistricting is a deeply political process, with incumbents actively seeking to minimize the risk to themselves (via bipartisan gerrymanders) or to gain additional seats for their party (via partisan gerrymanders).
• Presidents are elected not by direct popular vote but by 538 members of the Electoral College.
• While Republican voters have remained universally supportive of their President, Democrats and Independents are returning to a more naturally critical stance.
• In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties.
• With the parties at virtual parity and the ideological gulf between them never greater, the stakes of majority control of Congress are extremely high.
• First, his job approval ratings have been trending down for many months, a trend that has accelerated in recent weeks as the war on terrorism has been supplanted in the public's mind by corporate scandals, stock market declines, and a growing sense of economic insecurity.
• Congress requires states to draw single-member districts.
• But presidential approval also became a surrogate measure of national unity and patriotism.
• America is an outlier in the world of democracies when it comes to the structure and conduct of elections.
• A healthy degree of party unity among Democrats and Republicans has deteriorated into bitter partisan warfare.
• In the House, Republican prospects have been buoyed by several successful rounds of redistricting, which have sharply reduced the number of competitive seats and given the Republicans a national advantage of at least a dozen seats.
• Everything is politics.
• I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.
• If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
• It could become much worse.
• It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
• One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
• It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
• Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
• For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.
• For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
• For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.
• He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
• For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
• Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
• Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
• Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
• Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
• Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.
• But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.
• Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
• I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.
• Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
• I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.
• I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.
• For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
• People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
• One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
• Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
• Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
• Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.
• Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
• Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
• One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
• Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
• The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
• What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
• What is uttered is finished and done with.
• What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!
• We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
• War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
• Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
• Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
• There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
• A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
• The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
• A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
• The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.
• Speech is civilization itself.
• Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
• An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
• All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
• A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
• A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.
• A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
• The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
• A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.