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Exlpore more Politics quotes
"Politicians look for interests not people."
"And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet."
"I believe the term is 'eminent domain.'Ah, yes. That means 'theft by the government."
"Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties."
"In my view, any government whose state is perpetually at war, and remains so in spite of initiatives to make peace, is incompetent and unfit and should resign."
"If you have to say or do something controversial, aim so that people will hate that they love it and not love that they hate it."
Explore more quotes by Hilary Mantel
"His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed."
"There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing."
"You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."
"In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark."
"The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for 'Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.' He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on."
"He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves."
"As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire."
"He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself."
"Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled. (Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)"
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