“Let's get back to what I regard as a fundamental issue here. I know it’s politically unpopular, politically incorrect. I know it goes against all of the populist indignation that’s out there right now. But you can’t really, it seems to me, expect that these Wall Street companies are going to be run well by a bunch of people who don’t make more than $250,000.”

1960s, Telephone call with Senator Richard Russell (May 27, 1964)

from "Granada Reports", interview by Tony Wilson, Granada TV February 1985
In interviews etc., About politics and society

I Felt Like the Pied Piper

Source: The Jagged Orbit (1969), Chapter 6, “The Where It’s At and the Whyfore It Should Be There” (p. 26)

Reported by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker, said to Patrick Gaspard during a job interview in 2007. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_lizza?printable=true <br class="br">2007

Letter from Belfast ( 5 August 1953) http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.com/2010/10/many-letters-of-philip-larkin.html to Monica Jones <br class="br">Context: You know I don’t care at all for politics, intelligently. I found that at school when we argued all we did was repeat the stuff we had, respectively, learnt from the Worker, the Herald, Peace News, the Right Book Club (that was me, incidentally: I knew these dictators, Marching Spain, I can remember them now) and as they all contradicted each other all we did was get annoyed. I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, &amp; therefore I abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation. It’s true that the writers I grew up to admire were either non-political or Left-wing, &amp; that I couldn’t find any Right-wing writer worthy of respect, but of course most of the ones I admired were awful fools or somewhat fakey, so I don’t know if my prejudice for the Left takes its origin there or not. But if you annoy me by speaking your mind in the other interest, it’s not because I feel sacred things are being mocked but because I can’t reply, not (as usual) knowing enough. … By the way, of course I’m terribly conventional, by necessity! Anyone afraid to say boo to a goose is conventional.

King appealing for calm during the Los Angeles riots (May 1, 1992)

Debate with Walter Mondale http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/102184b.htm (21 October 1984) <br class="br">1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)