Quotes About Politics

But this momentous question [the Missouri Compromise], like a firebell in the night awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it the knell of the Union.

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

The second office in the government is honorable and easy the first is but a splendid misery.

No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.

Democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. That government is best which governs least.

No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it...To myself, personally, it brings nothing but increasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers wthout government, I should not hesita

We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.

There was no particular reason for the Canadian government to remember what had happened to the Cherokee in the 1840s. After all, most governments can't remember the promises that got them elected.

A hundred years? In political terms, that's when dinosaurs ruled the planet.

As I pass the Plaza Hotel with its beaux arts facade, I run into Bob Loomis coming out the front door. Loomis looks slightly startled, as though he's been caught voting NDP.

The problem is that we've got a sense of humor and (Republicans have) got guns. Will we die laughing?

The voters lack the information—or the interest—to develop a coherent view of politics beyond a general party identification, and this reality plays itself out regularly in U.S. elections.

As the political scientist Ian Bremmer wrote in the run-up to the U.S. elections of 2020, victims seek saviors, and there is never a shortage of volunteers.

Political identities that were once constructed from life among those we know in places we live are now formed over huge distances among strangers whose bonds are formed mostly over things they loathe in common.

Liberal democracy depends on knowledge and virtue, and both of these are now in short supply among the citizens of the developed world.

the only way to resolve these debates in terms of policy choices is to move them from the realm of research to the arena of politics and democratic choice. If democracy is to mean anything at all, then experts and laypeople have to solve complicated problems together.

change should mean more participation—but by informed voters through institutions that are not constantly and immediately at the mercy of a majority.

A society that is post-factual is pre-fascist.