Politics Quotes

When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.

~ Steve Erickson

With the single exception of the American Revolution, the aftermath of all revolutions from 1789 on only worsened the human condition.

~ Arnold Beichman

Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.

~ Warren Buffett

McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

~ Hunter S. Thompson

If you do politics the right way, I believe, you can actually make people's lives better. And integrity is the minimum ante to get into the game.

~ Joe Biden

As the nation divided into Federalists and Republicans, each group called the other the worst name possible: party. Most Americans feared the idea of party; believing that a society should unite to achieve the public good, they denounced parties as groups of ambitious men selfishly competing for power. Worse, parties were danger signals for a republic; if parties dominated a republic's politics, its days were numbered.

~ R.b. Bernstein

If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.

~ Edward Bellamy

It was starting to seem to her that being forward-thinking too often involved avoiding any kind of thought at all - especially about things that might benefit from a great deal of thinking.

~ Kristin Cashore

Observe this fact: in the history of mankind, every ruler who has lacked personal greatness has been forced to compensate for the deficiency by setting up the executioner at his right hand like a guardian angel

~ Alfred De Vigny

People tell me that Senator Edwards got picked for his good looks, his sex appeal, and his great hair. I say to them, 'How do you think I got the job?

~ Dick Cheney

To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the foot of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.

~ Joe Biden

In the evening [the Iraqi interim governor of Maysan province] asked me for fifty dollars to repair his windows, which had been destroyed in a recent demonstration. Although he was the governor, his salary was only four hundred and fifty dollars a month, and Baghdad had still not agreed to give the governors an independent budget.... For the sake of a tiny sum of money - a couple thousand dollars a month from the hundred billion we had spent on the invasion - we were alienating our key partner and successor. p. 264

~ Rory Stewart

We must have public officials who will stand up and tell the people exactly what they think... Our failure in recent years has not been the failure of the people to meet the challenges placed before them, but rather the failure of both our great political parties to place those challenges honestly and courageously before the people, and to trust the willingness of the people to do the things that really need to be done.

~ Joe Biden

Leaders say no to corruption. Anyone playing a role in governance, and is not ready to do this is not a leader.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but in all levels of society.

~ David Mccullough

Those who believe that where great personages are concerned new favors cause old injuries to be forgotten deceive themselves.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

Without an opportunity, their abilities would have been wasted, and without their abilities, the opportunity would have arisen in vain.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term 'Holocaust' had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.

~ Phillip Adams

We cannot move forward if we allow the past to pull us back.

~ Rodrigo Duterte

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

~ Terry Pratchett

The decline of geography in academia is easy to understand: we live in an age of ever-increasing specialization, and geography is a generalist's discipline. Imagine the poor geographer trying to explain to someone at a campus cocktail party (or even to an unsympathetic adminitrator) exactly what it is he or she studies. Geography is Greek for 'writing about the earth.' We study the Earth.Right, like geologists.Well, yes, but we're interested in the whole world, not just the rocky bits. Geographers also study oceans, lakes, the water cycle...So, it's like oceanography or hydrology.And the atmosphere.Meteorology, climatology...It's broader than just physical geography. We're also interested in how humans relate to their planet.How is that different from ecology or environmental science?Well, it encompasses them. Aspects of them. But we also study the social and economic and cultural and geopolitical sides of--Sociology, economics, cultural studies, poli sci.Some geographers specialize in different world regions.Ah, right, we have Asian and African and Latin American studies programs here. But I didn't know they were part of the geography department.They're not.(Long pause.)So, uh, what is it that do study then?

~ Ken Jennings

My first world is humanity. My second world is humanism. And, I live in the third world being merely a human.

~ Santosh Kalwar

You can call anyone you want a traitor as long as you're the one holding the pen.

~ Nihad Sirees

Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.

~ Walter Savage Landor

It is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

Money is a servant to politicians and the country.But, if the politicians and the country become the servant of the money, the politicians has failed.

~ Oliver Kemper

All you decent, well-meaning gentlemen, let me ask you, have you any idea what sort of place the world is becoming all around you? The days when you could act out of your noble instincts are over. Except of course, you here in Europe don't yet seem to know it.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

People believe what they are told.

~ Jacqueline Carey

Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the goddamn road.

~ Tim Kreider

The primary purposes of the political pamphlets of the early 1700s were neither to enlighten nor educate the masses, but to incite partisan conversation and spread commensurate ideas . . . Facts were not permitted to fetter the views they espoused, and the restraints of objective journalistic credibility were discarded by pamphleteers bent on promoting subjective slant to an insatiable general public for whom political dissonance was an integral part of social interaction.

~ Gavin John Adams

Jim Reston: Walking through the crowds of air-kissing politicians, actors and high fliers, it was tough to tell where the politics stopped and the showbiz started. Maybe, in the end, there is no difference.

~ Peter Morgan

You have two choices, [Plouffe] told Obama. You can stay in the Senate, enjoy your weekends at home, take regular vacations, and have a lovely time with your family. Or you can run for president, have your whole life poked at and pried into, almost never see your family, travel incessantly, bang your tin cup for donations like some street-corner beggar, lead a lonely, miserable life.

~ John Heilemann

In America, disagreement with the policies of the government does not necessitate a lack of patriotism!

~ Senator Mitchell

You don't get to be the president of anything if you have bad manners.

~ Daven Anderson

When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality.Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not.President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

~ Robert B. Reich

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

~ Clive James

Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.

~ Howard Zinn

There are men running governments who shouldn't be allowed to play with matches.

~ Will Rogers

No one is better at not beating America than England.

~ Jon Stewart