Political Scandal Quotes

The distinctive crimes of this generation are crimes of subtlety and finesse.
- ALEXANDER S. BACON 1908 ~ J.M. Carlisle

Unemployment is bigger than a political party. It is a national danger and a national scandal. ~ Ellen Wilkinson

Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest. ~ David Ogilvy

One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts. ~ Adam Davidson

For present-day politicians there are only political points to be made from such statements, and the larger the sin the larger the outrage, the larger the apology and the larger the potential political gain for sorrow expressed. Through such statements political leaders can gain the benefits of magnanimity without the stain of involvement: the person making the apology had done nothing wrong and all the people who could have received the apology are dead. ~ Douglas Murray

I don't think we need political activists on the Supreme Court or any other level of court. ~ Dick Mountjoy

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. ~ George Washington

Tax reform means, 'Don't tax you, don't tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.' ~ Russell B. Long

By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little. ~ Edmund Burke

As President Obama is inaugurated for a second time, the biggest political surprise is that gun control is now key to his political legacy. ~ Juan Williams

The politician who steals is worse than a thief. He is a fool. With all the grand opportunities around for the man with a political pull, there's no excuse for stealin' a cent. ~ George W. Plunkitt

Islam takes advantage of two structural flaws that exist in the Western society. One is political correctness and other is the decline of morality. ~ Ali Sina

I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music. ~ Amos Oz

People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. ~ Vladimir Lenin

One may gain political and social independence, but if one is a slave to his passions and desires, one cannot feel the pure joy of real freedom ~ Swami Vivekananda

What is politics? Political system is equal to development politics plus political politics. ~ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

I enjoyed the administrative work because it involved working with Congress, city council, and the mayor. I had never been a politician so it was fun - learning political maneuvering. ~ Harold H. Greene

'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions. ~ Natasha Trethewey

Feminism has had exactly the same problem that "political correctness" has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means. ~ Caitlin Moran

If in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave. ~ Jane Addams

The more you observe politics, the more you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other. ~ Will Rogers

The people must remain ever vigilant against tyrants masquerading as public servants. ~ George Washington

any form of expression that ceases to be an experience and becomes an art form loses its glowing divinity ~ Jo M. Sekimonyo

Drug use, once considered a private, public-health matter, was reframed through political rhetoric and media imagery as a grave threat to the national order. Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell show in their research how the media imagery surrounding cocaine changed as the practice of smoking cocaine came to be associated with poor blacks.35 ~ Michelle Alexander

I'm a constitutional conservative. I'm a Reagan constitutional conservative. I can think of no three better words to describe my political philosophy. And I will remain a Reagan constitutional conservative. It doesn't matter to what the elites D.C. think in the Republican or the Democratic Party ~ Bobby Jindal

As every close observer of the deadlocks arising from the political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral Goodness –which should be relativized and historicized- ends up in an oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any "organic" social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell approvingly called "common decency" (all such standards having been dismissed as subordinating individual freedoms to proto-Fascist social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended simply to prevent individuals from encroaching upon one another (annoying or "harassing" each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process (a "spurious infinity" in Hegel's sense) of legalization and moralization, known as "the fight against all forms of discrimination." If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, only the basic fact of subjects "harassing other subjects, who-in the absence of mores- is to decide what counts as "harassment"? In France, there are associations of obese people demanding all the public campaigns against obesity and in favor of healthy eating be stopped, since they damage the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the speciesism" of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal-for them, a particularly disgusting form of "fascism") and demand that "vegeto-phobia" should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And we could e ~ Slavoj Zizek

A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist. ~ A.P. Herbert

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. ~ George Orwell

The only continent where social movements have led to political parties that have pushed through serious social and political reforms is in South America. ~ Tariq Ali

Never is liberty more easily lost than when we think we are defending it. ~ Ben Chifley

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as ~ Karl Marx

Uncritical acceptance of any party line is an idolatrous abdication of one's core identity as Abba's child. Neither liberal fairy dust nor conservative hardball addresses human dignity, which is often dressed in rags.
Abba's children find a third option. They are guided by God's Word and by it alone. All religious and political systems , Right and Left alike, are the work of human beings. Abba's children will not sell their birthright for any mess of pottage, conservative and liberal. They hold fast to their freedom in Christ to live the gospel - uncontaminated by cultural dreck, political flotsam, and the filigreed hypocrisy of bullying religion ~ Brennan Manning

It will not just be conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats, people of faith or unbelievers that restore America. It will be individuals from all walks of life, all backgrounds, and all political persuasions who love liberty enough to fight to maintain it. ~ Chuck Baldwin

It takes money to run political campaigns. This is a cancer growing on the soul of our democracy. ~ Elizabeth Warren

Every new president inherits headaches, but President Obama has inherited an entire emergency room. ~ Madeleine Albright

As he continued to talk to me, I realized one of the fundamental points about Islamism that so many people fail to understand. The way Osman was speaking wasn't in the orthodox, religious way of the imam with a stick; he was talking about politics, about events that were happening now. That's crucial to understanding what Islamism is all about: it isn't a religious movement with political consequences, it is a political movement with religious consequences. ~ Maajid Nawaz

The cornerstone of the political correctness that dominates campus culture is radical feminism. ~ Phyllis Schlafly

In his life, a man can change wives, political parties or religions but he cannot change his favourite soccer team. ~ Eduardo Galeano

The resulting fractious, at times even dysfunctional, relationship between the top brass and civilian political leaders is one of Washington's dirty little secrets - recognized by all of the inside players, concealed from an electorate that might ask discomfiting questions about who is actually in charge. ~ Andrew J. Bacevich

Cockroaches are survivors. Turn on the lights and you will see a scattering of casino hosts in three thousand dollar bespoken suits, corporate fruit flies in empty suits, lawyer-class slime on their way to the courthouse to go shopping for other people's money, bankers shilling bad loans by bundling them together with good ones and sending them down the financial pipeline knowing that they stand protected by the political scum from every level of government who have risen to breathtaking heights of mediocrity, tossing a couple of bucks from the public till to the obedient myrmidons in exchange for their votes. While decaying empire crumble, cockroaches multiply among the ruins. - Bonjour Amigos ~ David Gustafson

We've got to figure out a way to cause communities to also want them, the political, organized bodies. ~ Lee Scott

Do you still believe i public opinion? Well let me tell you public opinion is a gimmick thought up by the English and Americans, it's them who are shitting us up with this public opinion rot, of you'll excuse my language, we've never had their political system, we don't have their traditions, we don't even know what trade unions are, we're a southern people and we obey whoever shouts the loudest and gives the orders. ~ Tabucci, Antonio

But I'm not interested in politics. I lose interest the microsecond it ceases to be emotional, when something becomes a political movement. What I'm interested in is emotions. ~ Bjork

Even on the saddest night
in times of servitude
there is always someone who resists
there is always someone who says no. ~ Manuel Alegre

If you happen to live in Korea, you might always suffer from anger towards people in power, because of political and social problems. I felt gloomy under this social dictatorship. Looking back, I feel like I never saw a sunrise in Seoul. ~ Kim Hyesoon

The passion for office among members of Congress is very great, if not absolutely disreputable, and greatly embarrasses the operations of the Government. They create offices by their own votes and then seek to fill them themselves. ~ James K. Polk

The anchor in our world today is freedom, holding us steady in times of change, a symbol of hope to all the world. ~ George H. W. Bush

I knew most of my radio listeners were lefty political people, and I decided definitively not to be that guy - not to address politics. ~ Marc Maron

The fact that most states are born of violent upheaval does not, of course, mean that disorder leads to order. In writing the history of events that are still unfolding in a state that is still unformed, it is impossible to know which tendencies will prevail and at what price. The safest position is the human rights position, which measures regimes on a strictly negative scale as the sum of their crimes and their abuses: if you damn all offenders and some later mend their ways, you can always take credit for your good influence. Unfortunately, the safest position may not necessarily be the wisest, and I wondered whether there is room
even a need
for exercising political judgment in such matters. ~ Philip Gourevitch

How do you react when your own government lies to you systematically about life-and-death questions? As I have noted earlier, the answer is political action in the state legislatures, and one weapon in the hands of the public is an understanding of the pseudo-science and pseudo-epidemiology represented by articles like this one. ~ Harris L Coulter