Quotes About Politics

Diplomacy was like a card game. The difference was that you never really knew the value of the cards in your own hand.

Jack Ryan said, "Benjamin Franklin put it like this: 'Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

They loved their country largely because they controlled it.

Therefore, it is in our mutual interests to cause unrest and chaos within America. The new American president is a weak man.

Your Highness, what do you call it when a high-ranking person lies right in your face?" the President asked with a wry smile. "Diplomacy.

I remember when Deng said, 'It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.' To which Mao responded with a livid snarl: 'What emperor said that?

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Everything was politics, and politics was ideology, and ideology came down to personal prejudices rather than the quest for truth.

It was the oddest of political prejudices that wealth didn't come from work, but rather from something else, a something never really described, but always implied to be suspect.

Everyone knew Russia's ambitions extended to the Crimea, but a few years earlier some steam was let out of the kettle when the pro-nationalist Ukrainian president was replaced by a pro-Russian successor. The fate of the Black Sea fleet in the port of Sevastopol seemed secure, and Russia went about its business.

The Kealty administration had promised more "openness" and "transparency" in the clandestine CIA. Jack Junior's father had written an op-ed in The Washington Post that suggested, in a manner that was still respectful to the office of the presidency, that Ed Kealty might want to look up the word clandestine in the dictionary.

Politics had to be the only arena known to man in which people took great action without caring much for the realworld consequences, and to which the real world was far less important than whatever fantasy

Morality in his country had been replaced by what was politically correct or incorrect.

Dominic took the bait: "If the President breaks the law, then the House of Representatives impeaches him and the Senate convicts him, and he's out on the street

Money won't solve our problems. Globalization won't solve our problems. Neither will democracy. In fact, democracy comes with a built-in trapdoor: the bad guy can get elected.

The idea of the "job" as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society. It is promoted by politicians, parents, newspaper moralists and leaders of industry, on the left and on the right: paradise, they say, is "full employment.

Just like any electorate, they delighted in making candidates for their favors sweat.

As the Athenians to the Pnyx, the antique Romans to the Campus Martius, or our Nordic ancestors to the All-Thing, so the folk of Tilling flocked to the High Street for extempore parliament.

Conservatives understand Halloween, liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don't give it social services, give it a scary adversary.

I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.

Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.

What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or at the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it must be levity.

Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics.

The international situation is desperate, as usual.