Quotes About Politics

A divine people lives in a world in which it is the born persecutor of all other weaker species, or the born victim of all other stronger species. Only the rules of the animal kingdom can possibly apply to its political destinies.

The instrumentalization of action and the degradation of politics into a means for something else has of course never really succeeded in eliminating action, in preventing its being one of the decisive human experiences, or in destroying the realm of human affairs altogether.

What the Nazis themselves claimed to be their chief discovery—the role of the Jewish people in world politics—and their chief interest—persecution of Jews all over the world—have been regarded by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or an interesting device of demagogy.

Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.

We have become so used to thinking of domestic politics in terms of party politics that we are inclined to forget that the conflict between [the party system and the council system] has always been a conflict between parliament, the source and seat of power of the party system, and the people, who have surrendered their power to their representatives.

businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and "thought in continents

Overtuigde communisten - de enige die vandaag enig belang heeft - zijn even belachelijk en evenzeer bedreigend voor het regime in Rusland als bijvoorbeeld de overtuigde nazi's van de Röhmfactie waren voor de nazi's.

both Hitler and Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them.86

Hannah Arendt

The truth is that the price of totalitarian rule was so high that in neither Germany nor Russia has it yet been paid in full.

Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Image-making as global policy—not world conquest, but victory in the battle "to win the people's minds"—is indeed something new in the huge arsenal of human follies recorded in history.

While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always will shout for for the 'strong man', the 'great leader'.

La razón por la que puede ser prudente desconfiar del juicio político de los científicos no es fundamentalmente su falta de carácter—que n o se negaran a desarrollar armas atómicas—o su ingenuidad—que no entendieran que una vez desarrolladas dichas armas serían los últimos en ser consultados sobre su empleo—, sino concretamente el hecho de que se mueven en un mundo donde el discurso ha perdido su poder.

The House of Rothschild became," as Capefigue put it,21 "the chief treasurer of the Holy Alliance.

The Party program was never taken seriously by Nazi officials; they prided themselves on belonging to a movement, as distinguished from a party, and a movement could not be bound by a program. Even before the Nazis' rise to power, these Twenty-Five Points had been no more than a concession to the party system and to such prospective voters as were old-fashioned enough to ask what was the program of the party they were going to join.

If you wish to found a republic, you first must pull the people out of a condition of misery that corrupts them. There are no political virtues without pride, and no one can have pride who is wretched.

Whoever takes upon himself political responsibility will always come to the point where he says with Hamlet: The time is out of joint: O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right! To set the time aright means to renew the world, and this we can do because we all arrived at one time or another as newcomers in a world which was there before us and will still be there when we are gone, when we shall have left its burden to our successors.

The men of the first revolutions, though they knew well enough that liberation had to precede freedom, were still unaware of the fact that such liberation means more than political liberation from absolute and despotic power; that to be free for freedom meant first of all to be free not only from fear but also from want.

Representative government itself is in a crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens' actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties' tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.

La dicotomía entre contemplar la verdad en soledad y apartamiento y quedar atrapado en las relaciones y relatividades de los asuntos humanos se convirtió en algo indiscutible para la tradición del pensamiento político.

A]ll historical and political evidence clearly points to the more-than-intimate connection between the lesser and the greater evil.… The natural conclusion from the true insight into a century so fraught with danger of the greatest evil should be a radical negation of the whole concept of the lesser evil in politics, because far from protecting us against the greater ones, the lesser evils have invariably led us into them.

The open, unashamed adoption of what had become to the whole world the most prominent sign of Nazism was the last compliment Stalin paid to his late colleague and rival in total domination with whom, much to his chagrin, he had not been able to come to a lasting agreement.

On politics] And a people that can no longer believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.