Martin Wolf:

It is hard to shift bad political equilibria.

Mike Konczal:

What undid the punitive bounty system was precisely its illegitimacy in the eyes of the people it exerted power over, and the desire to rectify it by building a legitimate state and bureaucracy in its place. But we now live in an era when the legitimacy of the state itself is under attack.

Charles Simic:

We now live in a country whose political system is too corrupt to defend itself from crooks. Should some senator or congressman have a sudden attack of conscience and blurt something out, "dark money" brings them to their senses and reminds them that their job is to facilitate the transfer of public funds into the pockets of the few and to not ask too many questions.

Andy Herrmann:

You're sitting there at these committee meetings; they seem to agree with you. Yes, we have to make investments in infrastructure. Yes, we have to do these things. But then they come around and say, "Well, where are we going to get the money?" And you sort of sit to yourself and say to yourself, "Well, we elected you to figure that out."

George Packer:

Trained to see the invisible world in terms of particles and waves, Angela Merkel learned to approach problems methodically, drawing comparisons, running scenarios, weighing risks, anticipating reactions, and then, even after making a decision, letting it sit for a while before acting. She once told a story from her childhood of standing on a diving board for the full hour of a swimming lesson until, at the bell, she finally jumped.

Hazem Kandil:

One of the first lessons imprinted on the mind of Muhammad Habib, who joined in 1969 and rose to become the general guide's first deputy (until 2009), was that cultivating the right type of Muslim is what will eventually bring Brothers to power. It is no coincidence that the Brotherhood's first and second founders, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, were educated at the Teachers College and graduated as primary schoolteachers. In their writings, cultivation is treated more meticulously than anything else. For while this process might strike the casual observer as simple indoctrination with a religious flavor, it is actually an elaborate activity that borrows from at least four different schools: it instills a transformative worldview in the minds of members, as communists do; it claims that converting into this worldview is contingent upon a spiritual conversion, as in mystic orders; it presents this worldview as simple, uncorrupted religion, as in puritan movements; and it insists that this worldview cannot be readily communicated to society because it is not yet ready to handle the truth of the human condition, as in masonic lodges. The ultimate aim, therefore, is not to win over more believers, but to produce a new kind of person: the Muslim Brother. This is a person striving for a new world through a spiritual struggle that reproduces the experience of early Muslims.