Quotes About Politics

orator Isocrates: "Democracy destroys itself

She called the Red Cross, only to find that the Red Cross has no interest in helping, either. (She learned later that they didn't want to offend their Republican donors.)

People don't understand that a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.

a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.

We don't want our politicians bending to the whims of whichever corporation has the money to pay them off.

There is less danger, gentlemen, in living according to a set of high moral principles than most politicians believe.

In political activity . . . men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy, and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.

The trouble with ideology, Alice, is that it hates the private. You must make it human.

They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.

We may not have a 1984 like George Orwell's, but if the Tories have their way we will be a very carefully controlled society indeed. All very sad, especially as Labour and the left are muddleheaded and ideologically dogmatic.

The prevailing opinion among historians, ancient and modern alike, is that the senatorial assassins were intent upon restoring republican liberties by doing away with a despotic usurper. This is the justification offered by the assassins themselves. I present an alternative explanation: The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests.

A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this: Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A. Make communism look good.

it is not socialism that subverts democracy, but democracy that subverts capitalism.

What distinguishes fascism from ordinary right-wing patriarchal autocracies is the way it attempts to cultivate a revolutionary aura. Fascism offers a beguiling mix of revolutionary-sounding mass appeals and reactionary class politics. The Nazi party's full name was the National Socialist German Workers Party, a left-sounding name. As already noted, the SA storm troopers had a militant share-the-wealth strain in their ranks that was suppressed by Hitler after he took state power.

So the plutocrats direct the legitimate grievances of the middle Americans toward innocent foes, and in return the middle Americans vote for the plutocrats thinking they are thereby defending their own precarious socio-economic interests.

Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American) to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

I'm not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist. I'm simply saying the racists believe he's a racist.

The Obama administration has refused to back down on the insurance mandate that needlessly pits health care against the rights of the religious... This administration simply doesn't get it.

I would summarise my politics very simply as the maverick left and proud.

Every country in the world should follow the example of President Trump and move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. But simultaneously, there should be an embassy of all countries in the world in East Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Palestine.

To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

Trump's lawyers are right that if a president does what he honestly thinks is simultaneously in his personal electoral and the national interests, that's not impeachable, in the following sense: If a president cuts taxes because he thinks it will get him reelected and it will create jobs, that's fine. That's ordinary electoral politics.

Our country's got a sin problem, and I believe if these politicians in Washington would recognize the moral failure of so many of their policies that maybe we could fix it.

If you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin.