Politics Quotes

When journalists are 'accused' of being 'advocates', that means: challenging and deviating from DC orthodoxies.

~ Glenn Greenwald

June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary attempt at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in?

~ Carl Bernstein

Stable husbanding of the land requires community-wide language and norms for resolving interpersonal conflict, facilitating barter and trade, determining shares of work and output and maintaining organizational hierarchies. Although such social functions are the requisites of community life everywhere, the ways of performing them evolve differently from place to place. Each society develops its practices and sets of myths, symbols and rational justifications, which usually are held to be superior to those of other societies........And just as material reasons for self-sufficiency can turn communities towards economic imperialism, so the ideational justifications for autonomy can turn them into presumptuous civilizers of other peoples.

~ Seyom Brown

I dream of a world where Science shapes the structure of a society, rather than politics.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Social change doesn’t happen overnight: It takes decades for momentum to build and for the once-radical edge to become mainstream.

~ Dr. Jean M. Twenge

I know how easy it is to sound like a corny version of Noam Chomsky when talking about something like this, but in a country where millions of dollars are spent on nuclear weapons, corporate welfare, and many ridiculous things, doesn't it just make sense to take care of people first? As soon as we can make the South Bronx, Compton, Taos, and Astoria look like Beverly Hills I'll have no problem watching a guy orbit Mars.

~ Dito Montiel

On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress especially for the occasion... None quite voice the thought, but those who came in a steady stream to vote seemed to be saying that India may have fallen far behind its neighbors in the struggle for prosperity, but as long as it can choose its governments, it can hope for better in the future.

~ Shashi Tharoor

To recognize and comprehend what influences us and others is to function with purpose.

~ Mark David Henderson

Political tyranny is nothing compared to the social tyranny and a reformer who defies society is a more courageous man than a politician who defies Government.

~ B.r. Ambedkar

Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information.

~ George Eliot

Without patience, without absence of anger, no one can be called a politician.

~ Stendhal

... On the whole, the best fortress you can have, is in not being hated by your subjects. If they hate you no fortress will save you...

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

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

I wonder how long it takes for these people we elect to forget who they work for?

~ Dan Groat

Politics should be a field that attracts statesmen, not future CEO’s and board members.

~ Kenneth Eade

Donald Trump is nuts, his party is chock full of nuts too, and that is bad news for Americans with a nut allergy.

~ Steve Merrick

Politics is the art of promising heaven and delivering purgatory, and claiming hero status for saving your country from hell.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Many people take a very low view of politicians, but that is exactly how they conduct their social interactions daily

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Politics is the only art whose artists regularly disown their masterpieces.

~ Raheel Farooq

Every politician brings in a wide range of context, promises and characters to bring his mission of you to listen to his words and vote for him and later he won't listen to you at any range.

~ Auliq Ice

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

~ Gore Vidal

The American people, and the citizens of all Western nations, have the right to know about every single thing their representatives do on their behalf. After all, elected officials are merely representing those who hold the true power (the people).

~ James Morcan

Do you know the one about how politics is show business for the ugly? State politics is show business for ugly people who can't remember their lines.

~ James Browning

People don't have the imagination to understand politicians. People are too innocent

~ Halldór Laxness

Politicians were famous for double-speak and were consummate liars. That’s why George W. Bush had to be their favorite president. It’s easier to commit a fraud when the actor believes his lie to the point of a conviction

~ Kenneth Eade

Half of the people lie with their lips, the other half with their tears

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The D. or R. after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.

~ George Packer

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

~ Alain De Botton

Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.

~ Vernor Vinge

The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates...Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation.

~ Bertrand Russell

The only kind of appeal that wins any instinctive response in party politics is an appeal to hostile feeling; the men who perceive the need of cooperation are powerless. Until education has been directed for a generation into new channels, and the Press has abandoned incitements to hatred, only harmful policies have any chance of being adopted in practice by our present political methods. But there is no obvious means of altering education and the Press until our political system is altered. From this dilemma there is no issue by means of ordinary action, at any rate for a long time to come. The best that can be hoped, it seems to me, is that we should, as many of us as possible, become political skeptics, rigidly abstaining from belief in the various attractive party programmes that are put before us from time to time.

~ Bertrand Russell

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

The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the experts consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so. (The proviso is essential, because measures which arouse serious resentment are seldom advantageous, whatever merits they may have otherwise.) The power of the politician, in a democracy, depends upon his adopting the opinions which seem right to the average man. It is useless to urge that politicians ought to be high-minded enough to advocate what enlightened opinion considers good, because if they do they are swept aside for others.

~ Bertrand Russell

Under every stone lurks a politician.

~ Aristophanes

A politician has an axe to grindWith which he aims to chop off half your mind.

~ Chris I. Naylor

Women must show their public face. We must help to work out our own community problems. We must insist on having equal voices and equal responsibilities. . . In large part, success depends on changing minds at home, in the streets, and at the workplace - not just in legislatures and in the courts. Each and every one of us has and important role to play in completing that task.

~ Joan Biskupic

Just because you talk about it or advocate for one position doesn't mean you care more. Just because someone doesn't talk about it and advocates a different position doesn't mean they care less.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

I've spent a lifetime in challenge. There's no way in which you can create any meaningful change unless you do that.

~ Bella Abzug

Whenever people talk in the abstract about the pros and cons of immigration, one should not forget that immigrants are individual human beings whose lives happen not to fit neatly within national borders – and that like all human beings, they are all different.How different, though? Different better, or different worse? Such basic questions underlie whether people are willing to accept outsiders in their midst

~ Philippe Legrain

Lebanon: the country where everyone wants a piece while we want peace.

~ Sandra Chami Kassis