Politics Quotes

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Republicans don't like people to talk about depressions. You can hardly blame them for that. You remember the old saying: Don't talk about rope in the house where somebody has been hanged.

~ Harry Truman

The '60s redefined narcissism as idealism.

~ Dennis Prager

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than politicians think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

~ Michel Foucault

In modern politics, even the leader of the free world needs help from the sultan of Facebookistan.

~ Rebecca Mackinnon

Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials.

~ Thomas Frank

I think it’s important that (Roe v. Wade) remain legal for medical reasons and other reasons.

~ Laura Bush

When the president during the campaign said he was against nation building, I didn't realize he meant our nation.

~ Al Franken

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.

~ Hannah Arendt

Gay diversity is like the Village People. You can all wear different stupid outfits as long as you sing the same stupid song.

~ Jack Malebranche

What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Where are our Men of abilities? Why do they not come forth to save their Country?

~ George Washington

By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims supressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.

~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I find that the world is changing much, much faster than I can even bitch about it.

~ Bill Maher

Political corruption, social greed, and Americanized quasi-socialism can ruin even the most wonderful places. California proved that.

~ Tiffany Madison

Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.

~ Roger Zelazny

If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.(Speech in Rome on 20 January, 1927, praising Mussolini)

~ Winston S. Churchill

A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.

~ Adlai E. Stevenson Ii

[Two respondents] minimized the assimilationist implications of the dominant account; Russ Silver rejects the idea entirely.I have no interest in being accepted. I consider this system corrupt, and I don't want to be accepted by it. We're in this together. Faggots, junkies, women, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, don't you see it? Don't you see that our white male government doesn't care about us? When I say this it shocks coat-and-tie lesbians and gay men everywhere. Well, I'm sorry, folks; if you had AIDS you would know what I know: The government doesn't give a goddamn cent for a faggot's life.

~ Vera Whisman

When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.

~ Nancy Isenberg

We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom....Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.

~ Peggy Noonan

Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. And the time has now arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and to help them get that protection.

~ Harry Truman

If you think Hollywood is depressing and corrupt, politics is really depressing and corrupt -- and fueled even more than Hollywood by money -- if that's possible.

~ Ben Affleck

When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?

~ Walter Kirn

Nonviolent action on behalf of justice is no automatic forumla with promise of success: but neither is war. After all, at least half of the people who go to war for some cause deemed worthy of it are defeated.

~ John Howard Yoder

The Government is making a fool of itself by attributing all terrorism and acts against the government only to one single patriot

~ Carlos Marighella

Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.

~ Bell Hooks

He who causes another to become powerful ruins himself, for he brings such a power into being either by design or by force, and both of these elements are suspects to the one whom he has made powerful.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

Over the last fifteen months we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been to fifty-seven states. I think, one left to go.

~ Barack Obama

It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.

~ Isaac Asimov

Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama's running so we all can fly.

~ Jay-Z

The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round.

~ Paul Krugman

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned.The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

~ Henry A. Wallace

It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.

~ John Pilger

When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?

~ George Orwell

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

Tides are like politics. They come and go with a great deal of fuss and noise, but inevitably they leave the beach just as they found it. On those few occasions when major change does occur, it is rarely a good news.

~ Jack Mcdevitt

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental practices.

~ Jared Diamond

Women deserve better than propaganda and lies to get into panties. Propaganda and lies to get into office, to get out of court, to get out of paying child support. Get the fuck out of our decisions and give us back our voice. Women deserve better; women deserve choice.

~ Sonya Renee Taylor

This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one.

~ Christopher Hitchens