Quotes About Politics

Are there good governments and bad governments? No, there are only bad governments and worse governments.

they thought that writing had something to do with the politics of the thing. they were simply not crazy enough in the head to sit down to a typer and let the words bang out. they didn't want to write they wanted to succeed at writing.

people who believe in politics are like people who believe in god: they are sucking wind through bent straws. there

We are dying birds we are sinking ships— the world rocks down against us and we throw out our arms and we throw out our legs like the death kiss of the centipede: but they kindly snap our backs and call our poison "politics.

One of the failures of Democracy is that the common vote guarantees a common leader who then leads us to a common apathetic predictability!

dog is much admired by Man because he believes in the hand which feeds him. a perfect setup, for 13 cents a day you've got a hired killer who thinks you are God. a dog can't tell a Nazi from a Republican from a Commie from a Democrat, and many times, neither can I.

what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference.

Seventeenth-century West Africa was even more politically fragmented than Europe. A map prepared by Thornton shows more than sixty different states of wildly varying size.

Both parties make a public show of how bitter their conflicts are, and how dangerous it would be for the other party to achieve power, while both prostitute themselves to the financial sector, powerful industries, and the wealthy.

Toda era tem sua loucura peculiar; algum plano, projeto ou fantasia em que mergulha, estimulada pelo amor do ganho, pela necessidade de emoção ou pela simples força da imitação. Se tudo isso falhar, ela ainda assim possui uma loucura, a que é incitada por causas políticas ou religiosas, ou por ambas combinadas. (from O mundo assombrado pelos demônios: A ciência vista como uma vela no escuro by Carl Sagan, Charles Mackay)

you'd better get rid of the idea that either one of us, or anyone else in this day and age, can appeal to the general interest, to patriotism or common sense, and achieve a result that's in the best interests of the country.

His mental powers alone made him formidable, for he was not only a general of note, but a wily politician, faithless not with the light and heady fickleness of a savage, but with the deliberate and malicious treachery of a professional intriguer.

This is a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher, only without the warmth and compassion.

And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies: (a) is a problem: Something Must Be Done, (b) is Something, Therefore (b) Must Be Done.

Organizations are not human beings and they don't obey the same priorities. They're hives. Like the bank you worked for, I suppose, but you were too specialized, working at too low a level to see the politics going on around you. Hives run on emergent consensus and policy.

What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself?

Technologies are not neutral: they come with attached agendas, with associated ways of thinking. Industrial revolutions are inherently political revolutions.

the United States is structurally an imperial project, it's in our political DNA. We're always looking for a frontier to expand into, we can't back down, anyone who admits we're overmatched gets sidelined and booted out of office by an upstart who insists that we can never be defeated, only betrayed.

Russian espionage directed against the West has been rising since 2001. We kind of forgot that you don't need communism to set up an east/west squabble between the Russian Empire and Western Europe—in fact, communism was a distraction.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority. —Lord Acton

Politics could be cruel and heartless. And I was afraid, with the tensions in Ireland, that it could also be deadly.

The democratic process will always favor small, well-organized groups at the expense of large, diffuse groups. It's not just how many people care one way or the other; it's how much they care. Two percent who care deeply about something

If sane, pragmatic, moderate people ignore politics because they are disgusted with the outcomes, then it merely leaves a vacuum to be filled by more extreme and dishonest elements. Unlike baseball, democracy is not a spectator sport. Things won't correct themselves if you ignore them out of disgust. They will get worse. Look around.

Obviously good economics is not always good politics.