Quotes About Politics

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with.

Deeply embedded in conservative and liberal politics are different models of the family. Conservatism, as we shall see, is based on a Strict Father model, while liberalism is centered around a Nurturant Parent model. These two models of the family give rise to different moral systems and different discourse forms, that is, different choices of words and different modes of reasoning. Once

So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.

Without social history, economic history is barren and political history is unintelligible.

There's a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.

Any gang of politicos is like the eighth circle of Hell, but the American breed is specially awful because they take it seriously and believe it matters;

As much as I value an union of all the states, I would not admit the southern states into the union, unless they agreed to the discontinuance of this disgraceful trade, because it would bring weakness and not strength to the union.

People didn't have the political guts to stand up against an American war.

Politics is an act of faith you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public.

The Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

I think the country's getting disgusted with Washington partly because of the decline of civility in government.

I think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic Party was more on the side of the average American.

Every program that ever helped working people, from rural electrification to Medicare, was enacted by liberals over the opposition of conservatives.

Rudd proved to be too conservative for the nation he led, while Gillard's campaign for re-election was too cynical. But the problem goes deeper than any individual's failure. Labor in office suffered a return of the identity crisis that has plagued it in its wilderness years in Opposition... the party had given up its soul to the machine. p208

Ever wonder why voters never thank governments for giving them tax cuts? Because it's their money, and it doesn't buy what it used to.

Labor provoked the nation's first race-based election in November 1928 by accusing Bruce of putting 'dagoes before heroes'. That election slogan belonged to Ben Chifley, the Labor candidate for the Blue Mountains electorate of Macquarie. '[The government] had allowed so many Dagoes and aliens in Australia that today they are all over the country taking work which rightly belongs to all Australians,' he said.

I don't consider Americans bullies, but I do consider the American government bullying.

God does not take sides in American politics, and in America disagreement with the policies of the government is not evidence of lack of patriotism.

It may be a sad commentary, but it is a fact that many people equate political campaigns with television advertising. If you're on the air, you're campaigning; if you're not on the air, you're nowhere. Just days after the first ad appeared, several people I encountered commented on it.

All nationhood is to some extent the artificial, the product of historical accident, the convenience of tyrants and the disengagement of colonists.

The failure to tell a new story has been matched by an equally remarkable omission: the failure to discern and describe the values and principles that might inform our politics.

It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.