Elections Quotes

There is no such thing as a non-dangerous dictator! Like all the venomous snakes, all dictators are dangerous! Then what is the antidote? Antidote is our love for freedom and our unshakable determination on the matter of keeping this love!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I am not for the left or the right, but for what is right over the wrong. I am not an elephant or a donkey, but a lion that stands only with Truth and my conscience.

~ Suzy Kassem

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

~ Neil Postman

Typically, in politics, more than one horse is owned and managed by the same team in an election. There's always and extra candidate who will slightly mimic the views of their team's opposing horse, to cancel out that person by stealing their votes just so the main horse can win. Elections are puppet shows. Regardless of their rainbow coats and many smiles, the agenda is one and the same.

~ Suzy Kassem

In other words if a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his opinions into account. One can see how this worked at its starkest in Xenophon’s Anabasis, which tells the story of an army of Greek mercenaries who suddenly find themselves leaderless and lost in the middle of Persia. They elect new officers, and then hold a collective vote to decide what to do next. In a case like this, even if the vote was 60/40, everyone could see the balance of forces and what would happen if things actually came to blows. Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest.

~ David Graeber

A lie is more profitable than the truth. That is why we have elections.

~ Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

Every time there's elections, we hand out cash. Usually to both sides, but this time the government is going to win for sure. The opposition is in a total mess. So we just have to pay off the government, which is good for us.

~ Aravind Adiga

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.

~ Christopher Hitchens

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

~ George Washington

Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.

~ Russell Baker

I am not red or blue. I am red, white and blue. Those are the same colors in my body (my heart, blood and veins). I am only human, and the human race is the only race in which I am an active participant - mind, body and soul.

~ Suzy Kassem

Every conceivable layer of the election process is completely riddled with vulnerabilities, so yes, hacking elections is easy!

~ James Scott

Maybe what stopped people from voting wasn't a lack of information about the candidates or a feeling that the outcomes of races didn't matter or a sense that a trip to the polls was inconvenient. What if voting wasn't only a political act, but a social one that took place in a liminal space between the public and private that had never been well-defined to citizens? What if toying with those expectations was key to turning a person into a voter? What if elections were simply less about shaping people's opinions than changing their behaviors?

~ Sasha Issenberg

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.

~ Otto Von Bismarck

The Nazi salute was performed by public officials in the USA from 1892 through 1942. The researcher Dr. Rex Curry asks 'What happened to the photographs and films of the American Nazi salute performed by federal, state, county, and local officials?' Those photos and films are rare because people don't want to know the truth. Public officials in the USA who preceded the German socialist (Hitler) and the Italian socialist (Mussolini) were sources for the stiff-armed salute (and robotic chanting) in those countries and other foreign countries.

~ Micky Barnetti

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going.

~ Joseph Alois Schumpeter

If you put your politicians up for sale, as the US does (alone in this among industrialized democracies), then someone will buy them--and it won’t be you; you can’t afford them.

~ Juan Cole

How do you trust a prime minister who said one thing before the elections and does exactly the opposite after the elections?

~ Kapil Sibal

I am constitutionally competent to contest the elections.

~ Benazir Bhutto

Elections are held to delude the populace into believing that they are participating in government.

~ Gerald F. Lieberman