Quotes About Politics

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933...Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

During the last presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama, asked why he was not wearing a flag pin, answered that it represented "a substitute" for "true patriotism." Bad move. Months later, Obama quietly beat a retreat and began wearing the flag on his lapel. He does so still.

It is part of the trivialization of politics that we give endless attention to the inner life of the politician - his private thoughts, his inner demons - at the expense of his outer life.

Remember that when the people or the legislature or the media approve something with unanimity, they're probably wrong. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which essentially launched the United States into the Vietnam war. It passed the US Senate 88 to 2. It passed the House 410 to 0. That should have been a warning.

even God cannot match the cruelty of his creation. For every Santorini, there are a hundred massacres of innocents. And that is the work of man--more particularly, the work of politics, of groups of men organized to gain and exercise power.

John] Adams saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness. That's politics done right, hard-earned, often by war.

politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness.

Ultimately to say that people all share the same hopes and fears, are all born and love and suffer and die alike, is to say very little. For it is after commonalities are accounted for that politics becomes necessary. It is only when values, ideologies, cultures and interests clash that politics even begins.

Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

I propose another explanation: The reason so many Americans have become alienated from government since the poll of 1964 is that government really has become more incompetent and really has become alienated from the public it is supposed to serve. Political cycles and political fashion have nothing to do with it. American government isn't what it used to be.

solutions are beyond the reach of the electoral process and legislative process.

it is said that roosters think the sun rises because they crow. Politicians are much the same.

Things are in the wrong place. Religion is in the box where science used to be. Politics is on the shelf where you thought you left science the previous afternoon. Entertainment seems to have knocked over and spilled on everything.

Nevertheless, four years later, at the end of August 2004, a Zogby poll discovered the critical fact that 57 percent of the undecided voters in that year's election would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry. The question was odd enough on its face, but a nation to which it would matter is odder still. Be honest. Consider all the people with whom you've tossed back a beer. How many of them would you trust with nuclear launch codes?

While Obama merely bowed clumsily in the direction of Idiot America, John McCain set up housekeeping there.

Politics is beginning to gather itself into an election season in which the price of a candidate's haircuts will be as important for a time as his position on war. The country is entertained, but not engaged. It is drowning in information and thirsty for knowledge.

By comparison, George W. Bush was light and breezy and apparently forgot during one debate that Social Security was a federal program. In fact, his depth, and his unfamiliarity with the complexities of the issues, to say nothing of the simple declarative sentence, worked remarkably to his advantage.

Because nothing sells in the modern Christian marketplace like the notion that Christians are beset on all sides by powerful forces desperately in need of a good disemboweling, it was inevitable that religious marketing would flow into the country's politics. And religion has been sold there solely as a product.

Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

In 1914 the German government asked prominent scientists and artists to sign a declaration refuting the "lies and slanders of the enemy". Hilbert could not determine whether these statements made about Germany were true (a rather political Entscheidung problem), so he refused to sign.

You can expect that out of Federal people and to make it worse this was a Republican gang that cared nothing for the opinion of the good people of Arkansas who are Democrats.

To the best of my knowledge he had never even voted, and then someone must have told him something about politics, some convincing lie, or he read something—it's usually one or the other—and he stopped being funny and turned mean and silent. That wasn't so bad, but then he stopped being silent.

For a member to say, 'I'm a lame duck' violates political science 101.