Political Systems Quotes

Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages. No common identity in 1000 linked Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire (in what is now the Balkans, Greece and Turkey), except the very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together. There was no common European culture, and certainly not any Europe-wide economy. There was no sign whatsoever that Europe would, in a still rather distant future, develop economically and militarily, so as to be able to dominate the world. Anyone in 1000 looking for future industrialization would have put bets on the economy of Egypt, not of the Rhineland and Low Countries, and that of Lancashire would have seemed like a joke. In politico-military terms, the far south-east and south-west of Europe, Byzantium and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), provided the dominant states of the Continent, whereas in western Europe the Carolingian experiment (see below, Chapters 16 and 17) had ended with the break-up of Francia (modern France, Belgium and western Germany), the hegemonic polity for the previous four hundred years. The most coherent western state in 1000, southern England, was tiny. In fact, weak political systems dominated most of the Continent at the end of our period, and the active and aggressive political systems of later on in the Middle Ages were hardly visible.

National identities, too, were not widely prominent in 1000, even if one rejects the association between nationalism and modernity made in much contemp ~ Chris Wickham

All political systems favour the powerful rich over the defenceless poor. ~ Gregory David Roberts

All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and the Nazis and Albert Speer's colossal structures. Today's architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark. ~ Rem Koolhaas

We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society.
It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others ... Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. ~ Pema Chodron

Roughly speaking, I think it's accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, at least in very large measure. ~ Noam Chomsky

The world today is so full of violence, obscenity, war, the failure of political systems. I try to make movies that make people a bit more confident. But that doesn't mean being sugary. ~ Rouben Mamoulian

Look at what I've done my entire life. I have been working on behalf of civil rights, women's rights, human rights for years and I know how challenging it is to change our political system and I have the highest regard for those who have put themselves on the line. ~ Hillary Clinton

We fight for territory. We see it in our Congress, we see it in our political systems, we see it in our ways of life, how separated we are. When we moved out of the cities and we lost all of the memory that was in cities, and we - one of the highest achievements in our culture is to be able to segregate yourself from everyone else, and the deep thing is the deepest punishment is solitary confinement. ~ Wynton Marsalis

The scientists are virtually screaming from the rooftops now. The debate is over! There's no longer any debate in the scientific community about this. But the political systems around the world have held this at arm's length because it's an inconvenient truth, because they don't want to accept that it's a moral imperative. ~ Al Gore

It depends on the state itself to retain or abolish the principle of representation, because it depends on itself whether it will continue a member of the Union. To deny this right would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is, that the people have in all cases, a right to determine how they will be governed. This right must be considered as an ingredient in the original composition of the general government, which, though not expressed, was mutually understood ... ~ William Rawle

What has changed in modern times, however, is that the media, the so-called fourth estate made up of America's best and brightest journalists, are no longer trusted.
Sadly that leaves the American people with no one to rely on: not the politicians; not the media.
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but political systems abhor a vacuum of trust even more. If we don't find someone to fill it, someone who can unify the country behind the truth, then that vacuum will be filled for us. ~ Glenn Beck

The traditional boundaries between various fields of science are rapidly disappearing and what is more important science does not know any national borders. The scientists of the world are forming an invisible network with a very free flow of scientific information - a freedom accepted by the countries of the world irrespective of political systems or religions ... Great care must be taken that the scientific network is utilized only for scientific purposes - if it gets involved in political questions it loses its special status and utility as a nonpolitical force for development. ~ Sune Bergstrom

This is what oligarchy looks like: Today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. The top one-hundredth of 1 percent makes more than 40 percent of all campaign contributions. The billionaire class owns the political system and reaps the benefits from it. ~ Bernie Sanders

Even political systems follow a form of rational tinkering, when people are rational hence take the better option: the Romans got their political system by tinkering, not by "reason." Polybius in his Histories compares the Greek legislator Lycurgus, who constructed his political system while "untaught by adversity," to the more experiential Romans, who, a few centuries later, "have not reached it by any process of reasoning [emphasis mine], but by the discipline of many struggles and troubles, and always choosing the best by the light of the experience gained in disaster. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as I pointed out earlier today, that they did invent our political system. ~ David R. Brower

It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems. ~ Terence McKenna

Considering the timespan of human evolution and the vast potential of humankind -- as evidenced by great genius and leadership, inventions and discoveries, works of art and literature -- it is lamentable that the economic and political systems of 'advanced' cultures are still based on the unenlightened rationales that 'more is better' and 'might makes right.' In the name of 'survival of the fittest' and ensuring 'vital interests,' our economic system creates an ever-widening gap between rich and poor as it dismantles the environment upon which we all depend. Even 'lower' animals generally do not foul their own nests. ~ Alex Gerber Jr.

Here, in the land of happy thoughts, there are no gross injustices, no abuses of authority, no economic and political systems to challenge, and no reason to complain. Here, we are all happy. ~ Chris Hedges

War challenges virtually every other institution of society - the justice and equity of its economy, the adequacy of its political systems, the energy of its productive plant, the bases, wisdom and purposes of its foreign policy. ~ Walter Millis

The laws expressing the relations between energy and matter are, however, not solely of importance in pure science. They necessarily come first in order ... in the whole record of human experience, and they control, in the last resort, the rise or fall of political systems, the freedom or bondage of nations, the movements of commerce and industry, the origin of wealth and poverty, and the general physical welfare of the race. ~ Frederick Soddy

It remains to be seen, for example whether China can continue to develop as a market economy while still retaining an authoritarian communist political system. ~ Peter Dicken

In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve. Biological evolution ... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. ~ Douglas J. Futuyma

In my opinion, a war between England and Germany was a war between brothers. In my inner self I admired the English government and political system. ~ Walter Schellenberg

Members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

New political systems and philosophies were imported into the Near East under the general term democracy and grafted artificially into a society which was feudal in nature and theocratic in spirit. The results were not happy... ~ Gerald De Gaury

To be human is the only way out of being human. An alternative exit - either by unbinding sentience from sapience or by circumventing sapience in favour of a direct engagement with the technological artefact - cannot go beyond the human. Rather it leads to a culture of cognitive pettiness and self-deception that is daily fodder for the most parochial and utilitarian political systems that exist on the planet. In delivering sentience from its so-called sapient yoke, one does not become posthuman, or even animal, but falls back on an ideologically charged 'biological chauvinism' that sapience ought to overcome, for it is the very idea of humanist conservatism that misrepresents what is accidental and locally contingent as what is necessary and universal. In discarding the human in the hope of an immediate contact with superintelligence or a self-realization of the technological artefact, one either surreptitiously subjects the future to the predetermined goals of conservative humanism, or subscribes to a future that is simply the teleological actualization of final causes and thus a resurrection of the well-worn Aristotelian fusion of reasons and causes. Human sapience is the only project of exit. ~ Reza Negarestani

If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation. ~ John Lancaster Spalding

The political system is broken, the economy is broken and so is society. That is why people are so depressed about the state of our country. ~ David Cameron

People have to recognize that it's going to take some time for trust to be built, not only between Democrats and Republicans but between Congress and the White House, between the House and the Senate. You know, we've had a dysfunctional political system for a while now. ~ Barack Obama

In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party. ~ Noam Chomsky

In the American political system, you're only allowed to have real ideas if it's absolutely guaranteed that you can't win an election ~ P. J. O'Rourke

And the state of his bathroom
I'm not one to gossip, but there are things crusted on his sink that have not simply developed intelligent life, but have in all probability by now envolved their own political systems. ~ Neil Gaiman

Things happened there that I don't think are the finest hours for anybody, whether it was a journalist, the legal system or, in that case of the political system, who would say that was an example of when Washington worked best. ~ Rahm Emanuel

In 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, we anticipated that Europe was going to have a very different bailout scheme than the U.S. because of their different political systems and different relationships between the central banks and the fiscal authorities. ~ Lou Jiwei

Many original occupiers believe the political system has become so corrupt that even participating in it, engaging with it, corrupts the movement. I understand what they are saying. But often, change does come more quickly from the inside rather than the outside. My advice: try both. But don't try violence. ~ Jennifer Granholm

I'm so moved when I see everyday Americans standing together, against all odds, to make their lives and communities better - whether it's organizing against big factories polluting their air or against big banks corrupting our economy and political system. ~ Sally Kohn

Any political system can commit mistakes and any state can commit mistakes. What is most important is to acknowledge these mistakes and put them right as soon as possible and put those behind them into account, bring them to account. ~ Hosni Mubarak

In his book Politics, which is the foundation of the study of political systems, and very interesting, Aristotle talked mainly about Athens. But he studied various political systems - oligarchy, monarchy - and didn't like any of the particularly. He said democracy is probably the best system, but it has problems, and he was concerned with the problems. One problem that he was concerned with is quite striking because it runs right up to the present. He pointed out that in a democracy, if the people - people didn't mean people, it meant freemen, not slaves, not women - had the right to vote, the poor would be the majority, and they would use their voting power to take away property from the rich, which wouldn't be fair, so we have to prevent this.

James Madison made the same pint, but his model was England. He said if freemen had democracy, then the poor farmers would insist on taking property from the rich. They would carry out what we these days call land reform. and that's unacceptable. Aristotle and Madison faced the same problem but made the opposite decisions. Aristotle concluded that we should reduce ineqality so the poor wouldn't take property from the rich. And he actually propsed a visin for a city that would put in pace what we today call welfare-state programs, common meals, other support systems. That would reduce inequality, and with it the problem of the poor taking property from the rich. Madison's decision was the opposite. We should reduce democracy ~ Noam Chomsky

Transnational, gigantic industrial companies no longer operate within political systems, but rather above them. ~ Georg Henrik Von Wright

The political system is not for the people. The people are secondary to the economy. It's about what generates money, not about what benefits the people. ~ Ziggy Marley

Socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic and political system whereby more men can get food to eat. ~ Jack London

New information technologies-including email, the web, and computerized blast-faxes and phone calls-have fundamentally changed the landscape of political competition in modern democracies. They've done so in three ways: by dramatically boosting the access of individuals and special interests to politically potent information, by making it easier for such people to coordinate their activities and exert political power, and by greatly increasing the pace of events within our political systems. ~ Thomas Homer-Dixon

We ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds, from being too strongly, and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own. ~ George Washington

I'm sort of always trying to reinvent and recreate a better way of being, because, you know, democracy has been "the worst of all political systems except for all the rest." So I think we have a lot of room to grow and be a better society, and it's a constant battle. It's an exciting opportunity to be active. ~ Adrian Grenier

The craziest of all political systems, the unique dictatorship, found its earned end. History will note for eternity that the German people were not able on their own initiative to shake off the yoke of the National Socialists. The victory of the Americans, English and Russians was a necessary occurrence to disrupt the National Socialists' delusions and plans for world domination. ~ Friedrich Kellner

There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, all political systems: Revolution by design and invention. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

I wish I could write a book that will be read for as long as our civilization lasts ... I would value it much more highly than any business success if I could contribute to an understanding of the world in which we live or, better yet, if I could help to preserve the economic and political system that has allowed me to flourish as a participant. ~ George Soros

I hope more women will join us in our journey towards a more balanced political system. ~ Sylvia Lim

Capitalism and political systems - like companies - must constantly evolve to stay vital. ~ Thomas Friedman

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

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution. ~ Steven Pinker

Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an elite; and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail. ~ Albert J. Nock

The crisis that the world finds itself in as it swings on the hinge of a new millennium is located in something deeper than particular ways of organizing political systems and economies. ~ Huston Smith

Child, all books are magic. Just think,' he said, 'about what books make people do. People go to war on the basis of what they read in books. They believe in "facts" just because they are written down. They decide to adopt political systems, to travel to one place rather than another, to give up their job and go on a great adventure, to love or to hate. All books have tremendous power. And power is magic.' 'But are these books really magic...? ~ Scarlett Thomas

Zero-sum thinking is a name for envy. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, gives an apt description of the "House of Envy" (as a poet in that most zero-sum of political systems, the Roman empire, might): "Envy within, busy at the meal of snake's flesh... her tongue dripped venom. Only the sight of suffering could bring a smile to her lips. She never knew the comfort of sleep, but... looked with dismay on men's good fortune... She could hardly refrain from weeping when she saw no cause for tears." I didn't know Hillary Clinton's involvement in politics dated back to the reign of Augustus. Then ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Imagining the overthrow of the current political system is the only way I can be enthused about politics. ~ Russell Brand

In a very real sense, the Constitution is our compact with history ... [but] the Constitution can maintain that compact and serve as the lodestar of our political system only if its terms are binding on us. To the extent we depart from the document's language and rely instead on generalities that we see written between the lines, we rob the Constitution of its binding force and give free reign to the fashions and passions of the day. ~ Alex Kozinski

I'm talking about equalizing the pressure between outer actions and events which are shattering and devastating to us and then the place where we recompose and reconstruct ourselves, where we finally achieve what Jung called the second birth. The second birth is the one that you can make, and the discovery of that to me was always a great relief. As long as we expect the changes to come only from the outside or from action outside or from political systems, then we are bound to feel helpless, to feel sometimes that reality is bigger and stronger than we are. But if suddenly we begin to feel that there is one person we can change, simultaneously we change many people around us. And as a writer I suddenly discovered the enormous radius of influence that one person can have. ~ Anais Nin

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. ~ Anais Nin

I do not have much confidence in the political system and never did. My goal has always been to change people's minds because as long as people demand more government, they will get it. ~ Ron Paul

From wherever the emissions come, they have the same effect: They trap much more heat from the sun, melt the ice, raise the sea level, cause stronger storms, floods, drought, bigger fires, generate millions of climate refugees, destabilize political systems, threaten the growing of food crops and cause a number of other catastrophic consequences which, taken together, threaten the basis for the future of human civilization on the Earth. ~ Al Gore

We have a complete void of progressive politics in this country right now. The will of the people goes ignored and unrealized. I'm searching for the people that can enter the political system, a strong third party. We need to consolidate. ~ Ani DiFranco

The future of any leader or political systems is to be determined by the people of the country. ~ Ban Ki-moon

How could such a destructive man [referring to Bush] be so popular with the American people? ... Not only is he poisoning our air and water - he's poisoning our political system as well. ~ Barbra Streisand

The problem is this. The spread of markets outpaces the ability of societies and their political systems to adjust to them, let alone to guide the course they take ~ Kofi Annan

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. ~ George Washington

To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character. ~ Alexander Hamilton

We don't have the leadership or the understanding of the value of this, and when your political systems and your economic systems start to fail, it's only a cultural understanding that allows you to reconstruct them and to get back to who you are. For some reason, it hasn't dawned on us yet. ~ Wynton Marsalis

Over the years, our political system has degenerated to the extent that it is difficult for anyone to make any headway yet keep his hands clean. ~ Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

Modern political systems are labeled liberal democracies because they unite two disparate principles. Liberalism is based on a rule of law that maintains a level playing field for all citizens, particularly the right to private property, which is critical for economic growth and prosperity. The democratic part, political choice, is the enforcer of communal choices and accountable to the citizenry as a whole. Over the past few years, we've witnessed revolts around the world of the democratic part of this equation against the liberal one. ~ Francis Fukuyama

Political systems must love poverty-they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor. And politicians in democracies benefit from destitution, too. The US has had a broad range of poverty programs for 30 years. Those programs have failed. Millions of people are still poor. And those people vote for politicians who favor keeping the poverty programs in place. There's a conspiracy theory in there somewhere. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Many of today's world leaders have great courage: the courage to do harm. The are ill-advised, too clever, or too skillful. I think bad political systems, by which I mean systems that are not founded on a desire for justice, are mainly due to a type of short-sightedness. When politicians see things only in the short term, they inevitably only see the short-term gains. That is how they develop the type of courage that is necessary to harm others. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

I was born and grew up in the greatest, the noblest achievement of the human race on this planet - which was called the United States of America. ~ Howard Fast

But you know, General, Jesus never came to establish a government upon the people by force. He did not even talk about political systems. He came to rule in the hearts of people, and not by the establishment of political power. He asks to live in you, not to control your state. ~ Ravi Zacharias

If someone was to introduce hope and idealism into our political system, I think the tension that would create in other areas would certainly be ripe. You would think that if you bring oxygen to the organism, the organism lives. But there may be other organisms in there that thrive in darkness and in a more anaerobic environment. Watching those creatures writhe will always be interesting. ~ Jon Stewart

All working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate ... ~ Katherine Anne Porter

Oh, Rachel, Rachel," Leah said. "Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of the nations, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that? ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don't draft people; it's not jury duty. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

What is the value of having millions of people in Iraq not having a repressive regime? What is the value of having the Iraqi regime not shooting at UK and US aircraft almost every day? What is the value of the Iraqis having a free press? What is the value of the foreign minister of Iraq going to Paris, calling for an end of the Gadhafi regime and citing Iraq as a model, as an example, that in fact a freer political system can exist in that part of the world? ~ Donald Rumsfeld

political and economic development among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems. Islamic ~ Samuel P. Huntington

I trust the political system to be what it is. It's a structure to keep the country running, a boat to get us [citizens] from one side to the other, and it has the country's best interests at heart. Not the people's. ~ Erykah Badu

Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system ~ Giorgio Agamben

The American political system is not good at trading sacrifice now to prevent crises later. ~ Ezra Klein

Democracy is not simply a political system; it is a moral movement and it springs from adventurous faith in human possibilities. ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

The failure of the White House and Congress to seriously address the nation's fiscal situation is certain to broaden the belief among many voters that the U.S. political system is broken. ~ Ron Fournier

The Animal Farm is a well written book in comprehensive english. George Orwell compares the communist Russian political system trying to make a point that that system was using people that didn't have a critical mind. What Orwell didn't see is that this attitude can be found in all the political systems where is no supervising and rotation of work.We see corruption in every country.Specialy in countries that are ruled by capitalism systems like Britain and America.I can't say that communism system was bad because people had free education and housing and they didn't have to borrow money from the bank. I believe that Orwell has been sarcastic and he was serving his country not the human race. ~ George Orwell

People have been tolerating their insane political system, in exchange for the countless privileges they are getting from their countries' plundering of the planet, and violating entire nations and continents. But in Africa, Asia and elsewhere, those "un-people" have no choice at all. ~ Andre Vltchek

Politically, as a result of Citizens United, billionaires are now able to spend as much money as they want on campaigns, which means that you have a political system which is heavily dominated by corporations and wealthy individuals. ~ Bernie Sanders

Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems. Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be ignored. ~ Thomas Sowell

I don't consider this younger generation to be lost, quite the opposite, they must continue. It is up to them. The old political system no longer functions. ~ Enki Bilal

If Americans actually understood the structure of our taxes, they would not only become angry, they might also find our economic and political systems intolerable because they are the cause of our unjust tax codes ... We could revolutionize the financial conditions of every American city and town - solve all or most of its tax revenue problems - if the property tax system were simply extended from tangible property to also include intangible property. If you want some quick solutions to our nation's fiscal problems, that would be one. Even on the simple basis of fairness, how can we justify having a property tax system that exempts the intangible property owned mostly by the richest amongst us? What a prime example of the Occupy movement's central point about the economic injustice perpetrated by the 1 percent against the 99 percent. ~ Richard D. Wolff

We've got a deeply flawed political system with an insane overreaching extremist element, with a Supreme Court that is completely loony. ~ Lizz Winstead

The Left/Right scale is a misleading way of comparing political systems. It doesn't measure anything. ~ Marshall Fritz

In the United States, the government is bailing out banks, intervening in the economy, yet in Latin America, the Right continues to talk about 'free markets.' It's totally outdated; they don't have arguments; they don't have any sense. ~ Hugo Chavez

About immigrants from Russia:
Soviet consciousness overlapped with the new American spirits has formed a specific and divisive culture. This culture is full of controversies and combines free will and envy, political conservatism and the desire for equality, ambitiousness in career and cutting corners, and earthliness and spirituality. ~ Leo Pevsner

The Army's new pitch was simple. Good pay, good benefits, a manageable amount of adventure ... but don't worry, we're not looking to pick fights these days. For a country that had paid so dear a price for its recent military buccaneering, the message was comforting. We still had the largest and most technologically advanced standing army in the world, the most nuclear weapons, the best and most powerful conventional weapons systems, the biggest navy. At the same time, to the average recruit the promise wasn't some imminent and dangerous combat deployment; it was 288 bucks a month (every month), training, travel, and experience. Selling the post-Vietnam military as a career choice meant selling the idea of peacetime service. It meant selling the idea of peacetime. Barf. ~ Rachel Maddow

The inquiry into the proper aims and limits of State agency must be of the highest importance nay, that it is perhaps more vitally momentous than any other political question. ~ Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Easy money, sudden fortunes, increasingly powerful political machines and blatant corruption transformed much of the nation; and the Senate, as befits a democratic legislative body, accurately represented the nation. ~ John F. Kennedy

The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or limited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same [whether] in a majority of a popular assembly; an aristocratic council; or oligarchical junto and a single emperor - equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and in every respect diabolical. ~ John Adams

Europe has a lot of strength. We need to pool that strength, and I am very much in favour of that - more of a deeper political union. ~ George Papandreou