Quotes About Politics

There is ideology and populism and then there's sheer madness of sending your country into a recession to prove a point no one understands.

These bandits would tax their own military to buy the votes of morons.

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

The prohibition law, written for weaklings and derelicts, has divided the nation, like Gaul, into three parts - wets, drys, and hypocrites.

Obama wins, thus goodness wins.

This line of reasoning brings us to a challenging question: If people are as incapable, as immoral, and as ignorant as the politicians indicate, then why is the right of these same people to vote defended with such passionate insistence?

How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain—prosperity, in a positive sense, wealth, science, religion—should ever have gained ground in the political world?

We now observe this fatal idea: The people who, during the election, were so wise, so moral, and so perfect, now have no tendencies whatever; or if they have any, they are tendencies that lead downward into degradation.

As long as these ideas prevail, it is clear that the responsibility of government is enormous. Good fortune and bad fortune, wealth and destitution, equality and inequality, virtue and vice – all then depend upon political administration.

Mr. de Lamartine once wrote to me thusly: "Your doctrine is only the half of my program. You have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity." I answered him: "The second half of your program will destroy the first.

Bastiat was a nineteenth century French political economist who dedicated the last years of his short life to proving that government by its nature possesses neither the moral authority to intervene in our freedom nor the practical ability to create prosperity through its intervention.

Nevertheless, even in the United States, there are two questions, and only two, that from the beginning have endangered political order. And what are these two questions? That of slavery and that of tariffs; that is, precisely the only two questions in which, contrary to the general spirit of this republic, law has taken the character of a plunderer.

As soon as the injured classes have recovered their political rights, their first thought is not to abolish plunder (this would suppose them to possess enlightenment, which they cannot have), but to organize against the other classes, and to their own detriment, a system of reprisals—as if it was necessary, before the reign of justice arrives, that all should undergo a cruel retribution—some for their iniquity and some for their ignorance.

La gran desventura de Francia es la preferencia de la igualdad por encima de la libertad.   Alexis de Tocqueville.

in the social sciences authorities are rarely acknowledged. As each individual daily acts upon his own notions whether right or wrong, of morals, hygiene, and economy; of politics, whether reasonable or absurd, each one thinks he has a right to prattle, comment, decide, and dictate in these matters.

Another effect of this deplorable perversion of the law is, that it gives to human passions and to political struggles, and, in general, to politics, properly so called, an exaggerated preponderance. I

La gran desventura de Francia es la preferencia de la igualdad por encima de la libertad. Alexis de Tocqueville. LA LEY LA Ley ¡pervertida!

As classes espoliadas acabarão por entender como entrar no jogo político e espoliar seus semelhantes. A legislação jamais será guiada por quaisquer princípios de justiça, mas apenas pela força política bruta.

no podía dejar de pensar en aquella frase de Adolf Hitler: «Si desea la simpatía de las masas, tiene que decirles las cosas más estúpidas y crudas.» Ese desprecio,

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

Memory itself is a political event. Social structures are often so powerful that they actually format memory into accepted boundaries, denying the validity of experiences outside the parameters of accepted social interpretations and distorting and fragmenting experience. Consequently, creating spaces for re-memory may be a profoundly liberating and energizing experience.

Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.

Lesson no. 12: It's harder to be happy in a country run by bad people.

All theatre is political -- just as all other activities of human beings are political -- because theatre is not autonomous and must thus decide whose interests it serves.