Select Quayle Topics: Literature

You always learn something by reading the classics. Particularly The Prince. I go through and look at this from this intellectual point of view. Machiavelli had these three classes of mind. The first class was the person that was creative enough to be leader and be able to lead a great nation without much help. The second class of mind was one that wasn't creative but could take ideas, put people around him, and be able to lead nations forward. And the third class of people didn't really know much of anything. And they were the worst kind of leaders, because not only were they not creative, but they didn't know what was right or wrong, and they just sort of went by whatever they felt like.

I've tried to figure out where I am. I know I'm not the first because I don't think I have the creativeness that Machiavelli talks about. If I go back and reread it I might figure it out exactly where I put myself. I'm somewhere between two and one.

-- Senator Dan Quayle gives his opinion of the book 'The Prince', 9/28/88 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)

And it was a very good book of Rasputin's involvement in that, which shows how people that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.
-- Senator Dan Quayle gives his opinion of the book 'Nicholas, and Alexandra', to Hendrick Hertzberg of the New Republic, 9/28/88 (reported in Savvy Woman, 1/89, p. 56)

It's the best book I've certainly read. And he goes through it; he starts around the turn of the century up through Vietnam. And it's a very good historical book about history.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle on Paul Johnson's 'Modern Times' (Playboy, 1/93)

[The book, 'The Satanic Verses'] is obviously not only offensive but, I would think most of us would say, in bad taste.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle commenting on the book which caused Salman Rushdie to be placed under a death sentence. The Vice-President had not read the book. 3/16/89 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)