Politics & Power Quote by Hillary Clinton

Politics rarely flatters the idealist, and Clinton’s line is a kind of discipline disguised as inspiration. By calling politics an “art,” she trades the fantasy of clean, mechanized solutions for something messier: improvisation under constraint. The word choice matters. “Practice” suggests repetition, error, and stamina - not a single triumphal moment. It frames governing as craftwork: you learn it by doing it, in public, while people heckle from the sidelines.

The pivot is “what appears to be impossible.” Clinton isn’t promising miracles; she’s naming perception as a political battlefield. “Impossible” is often a label applied by incumbents protecting the status quo, by activists setting purity tests, or by media narratives that reduce policy to horse-race math. Her formulation quietly asserts that feasibility is negotiable: move public opinion, cut a deal, reframe the problem, exploit timing. The subtext is also a rebuttal to cynicism. If politics is only corruption or spectacle, then nothing genuinely changes; her sentence insists that the work of power can still be conversion, not just management.

Contextually, it reads as Clinton’s long-running argument for incrementalism with ambition - the kind that tries to turn a narrow window into a door. It’s also a defense of compromise as creative rather than cowardly. The sting is that she’s telling you the “impossible” rarely disappears on its own; it gets engineered into “possible” by people willing to take the heat for being unsentimental about how change actually happens.