Politics Quotes

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse

~ T.s. Eliot

Beware of affect adorning vêtement of effect.

~ Steven Wood Collins

It appears that no one is so unfortunate that he or she is exempt from spending cuts, while at the same time no one is so fortunate as to be ineligible for a tax cut

~ Jonathan Schell

[M]rs. Miniver was beginning to feel more than a little weary of exchanging ideas (especially political ones) and of hearing other people exchange theirs. It's all very well, she reflected, when the ideas have had time to flower, or at least to bud, so that we can pick them judiciously, present them with a bow, and watch them unfold in the warmth of each other's understanding: but there is far too much nowadays of pulling up the wretched little things just to see how they are growing. Half the verbal sprigs we hand each other are nothing but up-ended rootlets, earthy and immature: left longer in the ground they might have come to something, but once they are exposed we seldom manage to replant them. It is largely the fault, no doubt, of the times we live in. Things happen too quickly, crisis follows crisis, the soil of our minds is perpetually disturbed. Each of us, to relieve his feels, broadcasts his own running commentary on the preposterous and bewildering events of the hour: and this, nowadays, is what passes for conversation.

~ Jan Struther

collecting secrets was and is crucial to solving foreign policy puzzles.

~ Gregory F. Treverton

...the Bush administration may, in future years, be remembered 'for bringing peace to the Middle East' (as Condoleezza Rice has pronounced). History may be the mother of truth, but it can also give birth to illegitimate children.

~ Alberto Manguel

And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.

~ Thomas Paine

God bless our good and gracious King,Whose promise none relies on;Who never said a foolish thing,Nor ever did a wise one.

~ John Wilmot

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.

~ Carl Schmitt

In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

~ Paul Theroux

Politics bores you? Bronsen said.Julien smiled. It does. Apologies, sir, and it is not that I haven't tried to be fascinated. But careful and meticulous research has suggested the hypothesis that all politicians are liars, fools, and tricksters, and I have as yet come across no evidence to the contrary. They can do great damage, and rarely any good. It is the job of the sensible man to try and protect civilization from their depradations.

~ Iain Pears

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as the most flagrant of all passions.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into kings and subjects. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and band, the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.

~ Thomas Paine

In famine, a focus on women and children highlights biology: here is a mother who cannot feed her child, a breakdown in the natural order of life. This focus obscures who and what is to blame for the famine, politically and economically, and can lead to the belief that a biological response, more food, will solve the problem.

~ Sharman Apt Russell

To attempt, to brave, to persist, and persevere, to be faithful to one's self, to wrestle with destiny, to astound the catastrophe by the slight fear which is causes us, now to confront unjust power, again to insult intoxicated victory, to hold firm and withstand -- such is the example which nations need and the light which electrifies them.

~ Victor Hugo

Kurti had believed in politics, and politics had deceived him, the way politics deceives everyone.

~ Imre Kertész

The rich, the poor, the high professor and the prophane [sic], seem all to be infected with this grievous disorder, so that the love of our neighbor seems to be quite banished, the love of self and opinions so far prevails.

~ Christopher Marshall

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.

~ Christopher Hitchens

A prince ought to have two fears one from within on account of his subjects the other from without on account of external powers. From the latter he is defended by being well armed and having good allies and if he is well armed he will have good friends and affairs will always remain quiet within when they are quiet without unless they should have been already disturbed by conspiracy and even should affairs outside be disturbed if he has carried out his preparations and has lived as I have said as long as he does not despair he will resist every attack.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

That’s what happens when you crowd enough folks into the same sandbox: eventually they’re gonna start throwing a fit over who gets what part to play with.

~ Jacob D. Lochner

The Possibility of somebody emerging as a nuclear power or events happening that surprise us on the nuclear stage is still a possibility. It always will be because there's an awful lot going behind the scenes. Our intelligence just has to get better on the score. -Peter Goss.

~ Joel C. Rosenberg

Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Diplomacy and virtue do not make easy companions.

~ Iain Pears

The law is so complex and voluminousthat no one, not even the most knowledgeable lawyer, can understand itall. Moreover, lawyers and legal scholars have not gone out of their wayto make the law accessible to the ordinary person. Just the opposite: Legalprofessionals, like the priests of some obscure religion, too often try tokeep the law mysterious and inaccessible.

~ Jay M. Feinman

Too often in the post-9/11 world, when the time has come to translate the moral, and essentially progressive, roots of foreign policy idealism into plans for American action, liberals have said, 'Duck.

~ Richard Just

Revolutionary art need not be overtly political in content; what is more important is that it demand a new means of perception on the part of its spectators. The subject in process/on trial can thus be fundamentally transformed. Change here, at the level of individual consciousness, is a necessary element of social change. Seen in this way, the arts are not merely reflective of social relations but are productive of social relations.

~ Ann Daly

The past has given us much too many bad answers for us not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves. There is no need to choose between the fetishism of spontaneity and the organization control; between the come one, come all of activist networks and the discipline of hierarchy; between acting desperately now and waiting desperately for later; between bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in the name of paradise that seems more and more like a hell the longer it is put off and flogging the dead horse of how planting carrots is enough to leave this nightmare.

~ The Invisible Committee

Considering what is at stake politically, economically and technically for most organizations; usually justifying IT governance deployment based on one viewpoint narrows suitability and expected benefits.

~ Robert E. Davis

Nice mix of Tory MPs saying this issue shouldn't be used for petty political pointscoring, & Tory MPs trying to score petty political points.

~ Andy Zaltzman

Gillard is as likeable as Rudd is charmless. She is self-deprecating, he is ludicrously vainglorious. She is a mistress of understatement, he is a ranter.

~ Germaine Greer

Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?

~ Walter Kirn

That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture.

~ Tariq Ali

Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to it.

~ Tariq Ali

Considering thus how much honor is awarded to antiquity, and how many times—letting pass infinite other examples—a fragment of an ancient statue has been bought at high price because someone wants to have it near oneself, to honor his house with it, and to be able to have it imitated by those who delight in that art, and how the latter then strive with all industry to represent it in all their works; and seeing, on the other hand, that the most virtuous works the histories show us, which have been done by ancient kingdoms and republics, by kings, captains, citizens, legislators, and others who have labored for their fatherland, are rather admired than imitated—indeed they are so much shunned by everyone in every least thing that no sign of that ancient virtue remains with us—I can do no other than marvel and grieve… From this it arises that the infinite number who read [the histories] take pleasure in hearing of the variety of accidents contained within them without thinking of imitating them, judging that imitation is not only difficult but impossible—as if heaven, sun, elements, men had varied in motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity. Wishing, therefore, to turn men from this error, I have judged it necessary to write on all those books of Titus Livy...

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so) but the plain fact about the senator from New York is surely that she is a known quantity who has already been in the White House purely as the result of a relationship with a man, and not at all a quixotic outsider who represents the aspirations of an 'out' group, let alone a whole sex or gender.

~ Christopher Hitchens

To restrict or legalize abortion, to allow or forbid gay marriage, a legislator would need to write and pass a law, get it signed by the president or a governor, and perhaps override a veto. A Supreme Court justice need only persuade four other people. If he or she is not internally constrained by the authority of a text, he or she is not constrained.

~ Michael J. Gerson

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.

~ Christopher Hitchens

My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to approach literature and criticism without ignoring the political dimension. Even if I have failed in this synthesis, I have found the attempt worth making.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Republicans know well that a change of rhetorical pace is necessary. But efforts by their leaders to damp down the bellicosity of newly elected Tea Party types is running into the fact that the Tea Partiers have only the high volume setting on their amplifiers, just like Palin. They're like a couple having a fight at a funeral; politely sotto voce, then suddenly bursting out fortissimo with their plaints and accusations.

~ Alexander Cockburn