Singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen in een interview met journalist Serge Simonart (1992):
You’ll find that people are talking much more realistically than the leaders. When a leader begins a talk realistically, unfortunately they’re generally from the extreme left or the extreme right. But the thing that is appealing about their rhetoric is that it’s real. The rhetoric of the centre is chronically and obsessively concerned with a version of reality that nobody buys. That something really great is going on. Well something great isn’t going on. Something quite despairing is going on.