Politics Quotes

There's plenty of room for humor in politics, God knows, but it's a serious business. ~ Al Franken

That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone. (to Horatio Gates, 1798) ~ Thomas Jefferson

President Obama recently said that his day is all about politics, so in the mornings he likes to watch ESPN. So if you get the feeling he's repeating himself every half hour, that's where he learned it from. ~ Jimmy Fallon

The United States Constitution turned 225 years old in 2012. It is the central document of American history and politics. From all sides of the political spectrum, from ranks of society low and high, it is ceaselessly venerated, admired, and invoked. But all too seldom is it read. It sometimes seems that Americans worship the Constitution so deeply that they find its actual text a distraction. ~ Garrett Epps

You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion. ~ Susan Abulhawa

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our constitution works. ~ Gerald R. Ford

We in the press like to say we're honest brokers of information, and it's just not true. The press does have an agenda. ~ Bernard Goldberg

Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White's strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other's domain. ~ Christopher Bram

When I decided to go into politics I weighed the costs. I would get criticism. But I went ahead. So when virulent criticism came I wasn't surprised. I was better able to handle it. ~ Herbert Hoover

A voteless people is a hopeless people. ~ Amelia Boynton Robinson

I don't know what's more embarrassing, these musicians and actors talking about politics in interviews or the media actually giving them credibility about it. It's absurd that a celebrity could speak out on the economy or politics with no more justification than a hit album or a movie. ~ Paul Stanley

We should - we will - welcome people of faith into the political process ... It is essential that believers enter the arena. Your involvement in politics helps determine how well our democracy works. We have finally learned that government programs cannot solve our problems. Government can hand out money, but government cannot put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives. ~ George W. Bush

I didn't
I swear I didn't
get into politics to feather my nest or feather my friends' nests. ~ George W. Bush

Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people. ~ Richard M. Nixon

Nobody would think of asking the U.N. General Assembly what it thinks because it is dominated by nations with no power and less legitimacy ~ Dick Morris

Big money, big Liberal Party politics and big media are trying to get rid of us, of course, by letting Packer take over Fairfax - a media-only company. But we're hanging in there and doing the best job we can for our readers while we can. ~ Margo Kingston

Our mission is to go after Al Qaeda, not the Taliban. Right now, they are in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. We should go after them wherever they are. ~ Max Cleland

Political events are part of everyday life [in Colombia], so art and politics came to me as a natural thing, something that has been very much present in my life from the start. ~ Doris Salcedo

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. ~ Gore Vidal

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE) ~ Plato

As we learned from the Clinton administration and much of the media, a machine gun in the hands of a federal agent is now a symbol of benevolence and concern for a child's well-being. ~ James Bovard

Democracy is a continuous, open process of civility.
A democracy can never be "done"; updating democracy can never be over.

Democracy can be nothing else but a continuous process, because we use it to organize our life, and life is nothing but a continuous process.

Democracy can be compared to an operating system or an anti-virus software; if it does not get perpetually updated, it becomes obsolete very fast.

Trusting the updates or the "improvements" of democracy to the elected and the owned mass media is like trusting the updates of an anti-virus program to virus creators; it defeats the purpose of updates or improvements. ~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

I think it's a terrible system, but money in politics is like water running downhill
it finds its way. ~ Jonathan Alter

Then why do they come?"
Buonarroti shrugged his shoulders.
"Because things are in such a bad way in their homeland, they're ready to flee into a black hole in space, to a concentration camp, to the Sargasso Sea of international criminal brigands."
"Between the devil and the deep blue sea," said the new consul, demonstrating his knowledge of international idioms. ~ Vladimir Lorchenkov

I don't like my politicians entertaining me and I don't like my entertainers politicianing me. ~ Craig Ferguson

I think Republicans need to do a better job of reaching out to everyone in the United States. Politics is always about getting the support of the majority of our people. ~ Marco Rubio

Only careful political manoeuvring will be able to manage the situation. ~ Davan Yahya Khalil

My efforts to prevent closing of the gold window-working through Connally, Volcker, and Shultz-do not seem to have succeeded. The gold window may have to be closed tomorrow because we now have a government that is incapable, not only of constructive leadership, but of any action at all. What a tragedy for mankind! ~ Arthur F. Burns

In modern society most of us don't want to be in touch with ourselves; we want to be in touch with other things like religion, sports, politics, a book - we want to forget ourselves. Anytime we have leisure, we want to invite something else to enter us, opening ourselves to the television and telling the television to come and colonize us. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

When you have pictured and defined your desired legacy, allow your present life activities and efforts to begin reflecting the future you desire. Begin to do what you want to see, become involved in the causes you want to be a part of. Show your legatees how you want and expect things to be done after you are gone. This will enable them to fit the vision into their own as they make their own individual unique mark. ~ Archibald Marwizi

I shall oppose all slavery extension and all increase of slave representation in all places, at all times, under all circumstances, even against all inducements, against all supposed limitations of great interests, against all combinations, against all compromises. ~ Daniel Webster

Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack. ~ Ellen Goodman

Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil ... a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons ... never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error ... Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory. Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

If we do with Latinos what we did with African-Americans, Republicans and conservatives will be doomed. ~ Karl Rove

Both groups [of pundits] were critics, and that is the heart of the problem. If you are a pundit, you seem so smart when you are telling the President what he did wrong ... This [is] mostly BS. ~ Jeffrey A. Miller

There have always been hucksters, cranks and populists who see a brief rise in American politics, going back to William Jennings Bryan at the turn of the century. The body politic has a way of expelling these invaders. ~ Joseph Rago

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant. ~ Friedrich Hayek

They only trusted the wisdom of people brighter and more worldly than themselves when it was expressed in the vocabulary and style of rural idiots. In his guise as Brazenydol, he had once had a contract with DARPA to teach a team of physicists the basic terminology of tractor pulls so that they could give an acceptable explanation of omniwavelength stealth to a Congressional committee that didn't understand tractor pulls, either. ~ John Barnes

Politics /n/: from 'poly ticks', short for 'many small bloodsucking insects'. ~ Henry Spencer

Recognize that good economics cannot be divorced from good politics: this is perhaps a reason why the field of economics was known as political economy. ~ Anonymous

Money was the manure of politics ... ~ Barbara Mertz

I think we have a fascinating new and quite dominant input into politics - and it wont go away. From time to time, people articulate a view that we should ban opinion polls, but that's nonsense. ~ Jim Bolger

Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas. It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics. ~ Vaclav Havel

Jokes are many things. 'Funny' is only one of them. ~ Melinda Chapman

You know, it's just politics, it's a game grown-ups like to play, like we lil' children play with toys. ~ Sharon Maas

Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, bur raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I feel genuinely sorry for those who are so blinded by narrow partisanship that they cannot appreciate Limbaugh's energy, intelligence and satiric skill. They live in a box with bags over their heads. Though he and I hardly agree on politics (I voted for Ralph Nader last year and may go Green again in 2004), I respect Limbaugh as a political analyst and deft rhetorician who is a master of the microphone and who knows how to engage and challenge a vast audience. ~ Camille Paglia

There used to be a canny politician in the Hyde Park area in Chicago in which I at one time lived for several years. His slogan was "I am for harmony if I have to use an axe." As "Secretary of Charm," if and when my merits and ambitions are recognized by my appointment to that office, I will take a page out of old "Doc" Jamieson's book. My motto will be "I will have charm, even if I have to use a club. ~ Beatrice Fairfax

And the so-called 'political process' is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests. ~ Edward Abbey

In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain- hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause- will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiff, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt. ~ Salman Rushdie

My links with [Mahatma] Gandhi now are very political links because I do not believe there is any other politics available to us in the late twentieth century, a period of a totalitarianism linked with the market. There is really no other way you can do politics and create freedom for people without the kinds of instruments he revived. Civil disobedience is a way to create permanent democracy, perennial democracy, a direct democracy. ~ Vandana Shiva

I believe with all my heart, that Magnus is a worthy and superior successor to your current king. Therefore, I ask today that you reject Gaius Damora as your leader and take Prince Magnus as your new king. He will right the wrongs that have overtaken Mytica. And he will make Gaius Damora pay for all he has destroyed. ~ Morgan Rhodes

It is a game, the whole ball of wax is a game - your life, my life, politics, economy, hunger ... ~ Mandy Patinkin

[Bush Hating] undermines the good faith necessary for democratic discussion. Which is a large part of what people like Al Franken are all about. ~ Andrew Sullivan

In acting class, you talked always about keeping it real and don't act ... connect with the people and connect with the partner that you're acting with. The same is also true in politics. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

[Bill] Clinton was a pretty good president for a Republican. ~ Michael Moore

I'm very open about my politics. I don't believe in any political party at all, none of them. ~ John Lydon

Rousseau's ideas brought about-he moved the political process to the very centre of human existence by making the legislator, who is also a pedagogue, into the new Messiah, capable of solving all human problems by creating New Men. 'Everything,' he wrote, 'is at root dependent on politics.' Virtue is the product of good government. 'Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.' The political process, and the new kind of state it brings into being, are the universal remedies for the ills of mankind.49 Politics will do all. Rousseau thus prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century. ~ Paul Johnson

I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring. ~ Albert Jay Nock

Citizens are starting not to excuse political candidates who have web sites that do nothing but throw virtual confetti. ~ David Weinberger

All dreams of empire end because day breaks in the hearts of the slaves used to build it. ~ Luke Montgomery

Service is the rent we pay for the life we have been given. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

I became aware that there is no accessible high quality training that is freely available, free of dogmatic styles, agendas or commercial interest.
Magical training that is heavily tied to profits, fashions, and group politics cannot flourish properly, nor can an individual fully grow in such an environment.
True magical development is dying under the weight of heavy commercialization and group factions: it is time to look at a different way of ensuring that the integrity of magic continues for future generations. ~ Josephine McCarthy

Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism. ~ Russell Baker

Many of the pathologies that run through the carceral state also run through American politics today. They include the unwarranted reverence for nonpartisanship at all costs, the uncritical acceptance of neoliberalism in all aspects of public policy, the stranglehold that economic and financial interests exert on politics and policy-making, the growing political and economic disenfranchisement of wide swaths of the population, and the gross limitations of oppositional strategies formed primarily around identity-based politics. ~ Marie Gottschalk

The uneasy ghost of Marx must suffer the torments of the damned at the truth glaring from the pages of history that one does not abolish property by transferring it to the state. ~ Louis O. Kelso

A desire to rescue secular America from fallen grace has driven conservative evangelicals at least since the 1970s, when Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority as a vehicle for conservative Christians to muscle their way into national politics. ~ Nina Easton

The Blair government has lowered the standing of politics and politicians in our country. ~ Kenneth Clarke

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. ~ Matt Taibbi

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce. ~ Winston S. Churchill

Conspiracies existed, to be sure; many of them, and many were dark indeed. But fiendish? Fiendishness required brains. Nine times out of ten, conspirators behaved like buffoons and wound up exposing themselves out of sheer, bumbling incompetence. ~ Eric Flint

Philosophy has become the shadow of itself over the years. Nine parts history and one part reflection on history. It has been ages since anything original came forth in the field. All the good thinking has already been done. Nowadays, philosophers are mostly institutionalized academics - like me - focused more on the politics of tenure than on philosophizing. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the latter's conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could 'participate' substantively in imperial politics; hence it is not surprising that the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates. No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire. ~ Chalmers Johnson

Men in general are as much affected by what a thing appears to be as by what it is, indeed they are frequently influenced more by appearances than by reality. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

I believe Leon Panetta genuinely placed America's well-being first and foremost. I never took his politics personally. ~ Gary J. Byrne

And she never had, Doug mused, because war and politics go for the big view and trample all over the little guy. France during the Revolution or a steamy pit of a jungle in Nam. It never changed. He knew just what it felt like to be helpless. He wasn't going to feel that way ever again. ~ Nora Roberts

Sport allows people to come together, but politics divides people. ~ Francois Hollande

But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. ~ Thomas Jefferson

How can you hope to build up a nation by fragmenting its politics into opposing camps? Whatever one group builds, the other will endeavour to destroy. ~ Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

Politics has always been a mud fight - better that citizens jump in the trough
than lose interest. ~ James Poniewozik

We can't worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer. ~ David Cronenberg

Events of future history will be of the same nature - or nearly so - as the history of the past, so long as men are men. ~ Thucydides

We need many more intrepid women who set out to expand both their and our concepts of the world. We need them in writing just as we need them in politics. We need that sense of adventure, of reaching wider, delving deeper, pushing further afield, whether that field be geographical, intellectual, political, personal, or all of these and more. Enough with decorousness. Let us risk preconceptions and treasured philosophies, bodies and souls. Let us be big and bawdy and full of courage. Let's go. ~ Lesley Hazleton

The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive. ~ Steve Jobs

Movements in literature were not caricatures - in the sense that they actually functioned as an ideology in politics does. As now a monopolistic ideology in politics prevails in the literature as well a single movement prevails: that of networking as a literary quality. Quality = networking is the magic formula: take a Krijn Peter Hesselink, never managed to score a positive review but reviews are old news: it is only referential authority trickling down from that network pyramid that counts. Thus, nowadays its perfectly possible to be on top of the Pyramid without ever getting a positive review, or - even worse - I even see people rising in literary ranks that have never written any books at all. Ergo, your point that another ideology would make a 'caricature' of literary history is exactly the same reasoning used by neoliberals to deconstruct any political change: another ideology? Impossible, because they no longer exist, only we still exist.

In this way you get a pyramid shape you also see in popular music. It's still the bands from the 70's and 80's who earn the big money. New talent can't really play ball anymore. This of course embedded in a sauce of eternal talent shows, because the incumbent males have to just keep pretending they are everyone's benefactors. In the literature its the same: it is still Pfeijffer that gets the large sums of money from the Foundation of Literature, and it's still Samuel Vriezen pretending that that doesn't matter.

Martijn Benders

Above all, as the keynote of all Democratic policy, in passing upon any question, let the controlling aim and ambition be to keep the road open for private enterprise and personal initiative. ~ John W. Davis

Dr. Ben Carson has the most moving personal narrative in modern presidential politics. His mother, one of 24 children, had only a third-grade education. She was married at age 13, bore Ben and his brother, and then raised the boys as an impoverished single mother in Detroit. As a young boy, Carson was a terrible student. ~ Nicholas Kristof

In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures. ~ Frank Herbert

Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc. ~ Alexander Theroux

Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.

Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us. ~ Benjamin Carter Hett

In all political regulations, good cannot be complete, it can only be predominant. ~ Samuel Johnson

If their social institutions were abhorrent, their unwritten constitution bordered upon the absurd. The absolutist monarchs of the ancient kingdoms of Amara looked with detestation at the Shazarian constitutional monarchy. Yet this was no time to demonstrate loathing of the upstart nation; condescension could wait until after Sixto had been defeated. ~ A.H. Septimius

power happily walks hand in hand with abuse ~ Dean Cavanagh

God forbid that we become so brainwashed as to embrace a politician as a messiah and believe what the media portrays him or her to be. Until their tenure is up and they have done their bit, every politician is just another politician. ~ Paul Bamikole

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Your moral values & ability to rationalize; not your religious beliefs or political affiliations define what you should stand for in society. ~ Mamur Mustapha

The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people. ~ Noam Chomsky

And more than the quality of its institutions, what distinguishes a developed country from a developing one is the degree of consensus in its politics, and thus its ability to take actions to secure a better future despite short-term pain. ~ Raghuram G. Rajan

One who begins to live by rapine will always find some reason for taking the goods of others ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

We're getting the sort of 'compromise' American politics specializes in: the one where things are intentionally made worse for most people in the hopes that if things are made bad enough, the other side will cave. ~ Alex Pareene