Quotes About Politics

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

En France, que de gens à longues oreilles : ânes en littérature, lièvres en politique !

La opinión política del señor Mabeuf consistía en amar apasionadamente las plantas, y sobre todo los libros. Tenía, como todo el mundo, su terminación en ista sin la cual nadie hubiera podido vivir en aque tiempo, pero no era ni realista, ni bonapartista, ni carlista, ni orleanista, ni anarquista: era librista.

The senator...was a smart man who had made his way in life with a single-mindedness oblivious to any of those stumbling blocks known as conscience, sworn oaths, justice, duty...

of all scaffolds, the political one is the most abominable, the most fatal, the most mischievous, the most necessary to extirpate.

Here I must add that, in each social crisis, of all scaffolds, the political one is the most abominable, the most fatal, the most mischievous, the most necessary to extirpate. In revolutionary times, beware of the first head that falls. It excites the sanguinary appetite of the mob.

Machiavel a fait des petits. Louis Bonaparte en est un.

Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed.

It's open to the public, but Ã¢â'¬Â¦ well Ã¢â'¬Â¦ sometimes it's better to study politics from a nice, safe historical perspective. The real thing can be pretty ugly.

Fear changed everyone and everything, and yet, as always, life went on. Hour by hour, day by day, while politicians and military personnel were looking for bombs and terrorists, and while the Justice Department was tearing down Enron's papery walls, families went on with their ordinary lives.

Big growers helped elect FDR. He's beholden to them. Ever wonder why his policies help almost all workers except farmworkers? I want to make it better.

En soutenant le régime parlementaire, la bourgeoisie a cherché tout bonnement à opposer une digue à la royauté, sans donner de liberté au peuple.

Some people believe that, having debauched themselves in one political party or front, they can, like the phoenix, arise from the ashes of the old in the feathers of a new party, front or movement as fresh as if nothing had happened. In fact, there is no such magic formula for longevity in political life other than the simple and the obvious: just honour your promises; do not corrupt and debauch your party. 1956

it will require a struggle to try to make America reality-based again.

Looking back now, it's hard not to conclude that the anxious nominal party of the economic left, Democrats, was magnificently played by the committed and confident economic right, Republicans, for forty years. I'm not saying the shift in popular sentiment wasn't partly organic. But Democrats, after the Republican presidential landslides of 1972 and 1984, remained too dazed and confused and scared for too long.

corporate funds" used "for political purposes" were "one of the principal sources of corruption" and had "tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.

age twenty-nine the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which in 1986 made the Republicans' antitax fixation official.

Norquist is known for his jokey line about his wish to make the federal government smaller—"to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

Powell proposed waging this war on four fronts—in academia, the media, politics, and the legal system—and doing so with unheard-of budgets and ferocity.

As the incomes of middle- and working-class people flatlined, Republicans pooh-poohed rising economic inequality and insecurity; economic insecurity does correlate with greater religiosity; and for white Americans, greater religiosity does correlate with voting Republican. For Republican politicians and their rich-getting-richer donors, that's a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.

In 1971 about 175 big companies had full-time lobbyists—that is, "public affairs offices"—in Washington. By 1978 five hundred did, and just four years later, in the second Reagan year, nearly 2,500 corporations employed Washington lobbyists.

And right after the decision removing limits from PAC donations, the number of business PACs increased from three hundred to twelve hundred, generating gushers of money that helped triple the cost of campaigns for a House seat by the mid-1980s, which in turn gave PACs more power, and so on it has gone ever since, a vicious cycle corrupting democracy.

Once a large majority of Americans came to believe that the federal government was uninspiring or incompetent or corrupt or evil, as they rapidly had over the previous decade, it was going to be a lot easier for the economic right to persuade people that regulating big business and taxing the rich were just plain wrong.

When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn't mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: "We forgot.