Quotes About Politics

I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia.

Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

Così i governi ci dimostrano quanto facilmente gli uomini possano essere ingannati e persino autoingannarsi nel proprio interesse.

That government is best that governs not at all.

We talk about a representative government; but what a monster is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, are not represented.

Le gouvernement le meilleur est celui qui gouverne le moins

The Church has much improved within a few years; but the Press is almost, without exception, corrupt. I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence, than the Church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. We do not care for the Bible, but we do care for the newspaoer

What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?

I heartily accept the motto, — 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that practically I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.

there is no conduct less politic, than to enter into any confederacy with your friend's servants against their master: for by these means you afterwards become the slave of these very servants; by whom you are constantly liable to be betrayed.

The demoralization that the debase­ment of the currency left in its wake played a major role in bring­ing Adolf Hitler into power in 1933.

The typical political ploy was to load up benefits in the present and push costs into the future. Yet that future always arrived;

They tell us how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace.

When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists.

Laméntase a menudo que los demagogos logren mayor asenso al exponer públicamente sus despropósitos económicos que los hombres de bien al denunciar sus fallos.

La política que propugne dependerá de la postura particular que se adopte en cada momento. Porque cada cual es unas veces el Dr. Jekyll y otras Mr. Hyde.

He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.

Great statesmen oughtn't to waltz.

the new high-class lively evening paper which was expected to meet a want felt in circles increasingly conscious that Conservatism must be made amusing, and unconvinced when assured by those of another political colour that it was already amusing enough.

She's a contemporary of the Medici; she must have been present at the burning of Savonarola, and I'm not sure she didn't throw a handful of chips into the flame.

A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion . . . as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.