Quotes About Politics

It is a clear truth that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own.

When sufficiently oblivious to their status as audience, the observers of a finite game become so absorbed in its conduct that they lose the sense of distance between themselves and the players. It is they, quite as much as the players, who win or lose. For this reason the audience absorbs in itself the same politics of resentment that moves players to show they are not what they think others think they are. The audience is under the same constraint to disprove the judgment.

This does not mean that infinite players are politically disengaged; it means rather that they are political without having a politics, a paradoxical position easily misinterpreted. To have a politics is to have a set of rules by which one attempts to reach a desired end; to be political—in the sense meant here—is to recast rules in the attempt to eliminate all societal ends, that is, to maintain the essential fluidity of human association.

David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski found Jimmy Carter to be their ideal candidate. They helped him win the nomination and the presidency. To accomplish this purpose, they mobilized the money power of the Wall Street bankers, the intellectual influence of the academic community – which is subservient to the wealth of the great tax-free foundations – and the media controllers represented in the membership of the CFR and the Trilateral.

American foreign policy establishment is inextricably linked to the banking establishment.

But no one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government.

Love of country is nowhere the same as love of government.

Socialism is the triumph of people's prejudices over their reason.

Socialism was made to order for tyrants.

The liberal agenda is the blueprint for national ruin.

The welfare system is the breeding ground of crime, addiction and radical politics.

They were doing what they thought they had to do. Their intentions were as good as those of most political and religious purists. In the time of Julius Caesar, Brutus was known as the most moral man in Rome. Whenever we think of what he did and of what then became of him, we are reminded that unduly virtuous men can be as great a danger to themselves and their own causes as they are to their adversaries.

They all knew borders no longer divided the world so much as ideologies.

I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.

After Congress passed SJ Res 34, we are no longer merely battling a cyber-kinetic war on all fronts, we are now in a state of perpetual cyber-kinetic-meta war, and there will be no end.

E-Voting machines are nothing more than dilapidated, barebones PCs with zero endpoint security.

No bishop, no king"; he might have added, "No devil, no divine right.

I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur.

Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating "all the elements of the Republican party—including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.

His success in dealing with the strong egos of the men in his cabinet suggests that in the hands of a truly great politician the qualities we generally associate with decency and morality—kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and empathy—can also be impressive political resources.

The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform.

For better than thirty years, as a working historian, I have written on leaders I knew, such as Lyndon Johnson, and interviewed intimates of the Kennedy family and many who knew Franklin Roosevelt, a leader perhaps as indispensable in his way as was Lincoln to the social and political direction of the country. After living with the subject