I knew Saleh well, having interviewed and met with him several times. He was a professional Machiavelli, fluent in all forms for political maneuvering.
The political tradition of ancient thought, filtered in Italy by Machiavelli, says one thing clearly: every prince needs allies, and the bigger the responsibility, the more allies he needs.
Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it.
When I was growing up in the south Indian city of Madras, there were only two political parties that mattered; one was run by a former matinee idol, and the other was run by his former screenwriter.
I think I would like the sort of job where you can work away in obscurity to try and improve things, without being caught up in the political maelstrom.
If I had political responsibility, I would want to prepare for a plan B that would foresee that the European currency union, that the eurozone, no longer necessarily consists of 17 member states. And that means to make provisions so that other countries are not pulled into the maelstrom through contagion.
Everywhere I go - from Main Street to Wall Street - people ask, 'What's happened to our political system? Why can't Washington folks work together?'
We know how to treat depression, we know how to treat mental illness, and we have not had the political will in our country to make it happen.
The last eight years have created a lot of deep-seated hostility. People take political decisions very personally, and today there is a constant, ongoing attack, with one side or the other being maligned.
Civics is not only how to run the country before it's your turn to run the country; it is, in fact, the study of power, practical political power. And you must start that process at an age level when kids' brains are still open and malleable.
Castro has lived almost his entire life as a clandestine revolutionary. To such figures, truth is always malleable, always subservient to political goals.
Re-election comes every six years, which explains why I spend so much time on Twitter. If you're an obscure judge whose name ID hovers between infinitesimal and zilch, it's political malpractice to neglect social media. I'm probably the tweetingest judge in America, which, admittedly, is like being the tallest Munchkin in Oz.
I'm a mammal at the end. I breathe out and breathe in and eat. At the end, when we go to sleep, nobody lives this political definition. It's something we connect by and we try to understand each other by, but at the end, we know that this is not who we are.
Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs - even when we benefit from them.
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
When I began my work on how morality varies across the political spectrum, there was a partisan, manipulative element to it. I wanted to help the Democrats win.
I'm not really a political satirist. I don't kid myself. I'm more interested in doing the mannerisms and the personality.
Psychological mapping for political ends is now going to be part of every campaign.
If there is a person behaving more destructively in popular culture than Mario Lavandeira, I cannot think of one. He has used cruelty as a crass mechanism to build up his own celebrity and has utilized political correctness to protect himself while using it as a weapon to dehumanize those he doesn't agree with.
I'm doing another pilot about a black Democratic pundit who's married to a white Republican pundit. And the purpose of me wanting to do that show - and ABC sort of supported me in the way they did - is because I feel like, you know, the political system is like an old married couple.
