Quotes About Politics

First, take the government of the Indians out of politics second, let the laws of the Indians be the same as those of the whites third, give the Indian the ballot.

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.

Politics is always driven by competing worries.

He [Barry Goldwater] was called "the cheerful malcontent." It takes a rare and fine temperament to wed that adjective with that noun. His emotional equipoise was undisturbed by the loss of 44 states as a presidential nominee. Perhaps he sensed that he had won the future. We -- 27,178,188 of us -- who voted for him in 1964 believe he won, it just took 16 years to count the votes.

The argument that a particular project will be "self-financing" is usually the first refuge of politicians defending the indefensible.

Government breeds more government, and a lobbying infrastructure to defend itself.

Talk about presidents "taking" the country hither and yon is part of the foam of presidential elections.

Bushism is Reaganism minus the passion for freedom.

A cardinal tenet of conservatism is that social inertia is – and ought to be – strong. It discourages and, if necessary, defeats the political grandiosity of those who would attempt to engineer the future by rupturing connections with the past.

Global Warming Is Socialism By The Back Door.

Washington DC is happiest when in indignation overdrive.

Progressives still express their worries in an essentially 1930s vocabulary of distributive justice, understood in economic, meaning material, terms. This assumes a reassuringly mundane politics of splittable differences—how much concrete to pour, how many crops to subsidize by how much, which factions shall get what.

Americans] correctly believe that its political arrangements are universal truths, and the understanding of the human condition that those arrangements reflect are superior to other nations' arrangements.

The State of the Union has become, under presidents of both parties, a political pep rally degrading to everyone. The judiciary and uniformed military should never attend. And Congress, by hosting a spectacle so monarchical in structure (which is why Thomas Jefferson sent his thoughts to Congress in writing) deepens the diminishment of the legislative branch as a mostly reactive servant of an overbearing executive.

In Geo-Politics, a nation has no permanent allies or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.

Presidents and other politicians manage the appearance of things, largely by manipulating the air and hope.

We should remember what Bismarck said in 1888: "If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans." Balkan

The argument for expertise as the basis for political authority depends on the experts' success at managing both their small niche and society as a whole.

If the cost of naming the enemy is diplomatically or politically unacceptable, then the war is not likely to go well.

The worst president is closer by nature to the best then either is to anyone who has not gone through what it requires to become president.

The founders made the president commander in chief for a reason: they had read Machiavelli carefully and they knew that, as he wrote, "there is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.

since the EU was created, there have been more wars in Europe than between 1945 and 1992. Many

Machiavelli wrote, "The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms. You cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow." This is a better definition of realism than the realists have given us.