Quotes About Politics

States are built not on the ideals but on the nature of men.

From whatever angle we approach our eternal political problem we monotonously reach the same conclusion: that the community should determine the ends to be pursued, but that only experts should select and apply the means; that choice should be democratically spread, but that office should be rigidly reserved for the equipped and winnowed best. (Chapter on Aristotle p.89/543)

in politics, as in love, it does not do to give one's self wholly; one should at all times give, but at no time all. Gratitude is nourished with expectation.

We recall Macaulay's warning that democracy would collapse when the poor used their electoral power to rob rich Peter to pay lazy Paul. Polybius expressed the same idea in 130 BC: When

Is it not shameful that men should be ruled by orators, who "go ringing on in long harangues, like brazen pots which, when struck, continue to sound till a hand is put upon them"?

On August 26 the Assembly responded by conferring French citizenship upon Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, Anacharsis Cloots, Johann Pestalozzi, Thaddeus Kosciusko, Friedrich Schiller, George Washington, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.

No es la raza la que crea la civilización, es la civilización la que crea el pueblo: las circunstancias geográficas, económicas y políticas crean una cultura, y la cultura crea un tipo humano.

Nothing was more tiresome than a candidate who started to believe his own spin.

If I lived in North Korea, I'd want my own army, too.

I am really sorry to see my Countrymen trouble themselves about Politics. If Men were Wise, the Most arbitrary Princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the Freest Government is compell'd to be a Tyranny. Princes appear to me to be Fools. Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something Else besides Human life.

Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy.

National Review will support the rightwardmost viable candidate.

He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government. That, of course, is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.

people seemed to hold that the one sole end of the entire establishment of public office was to elect one man like Sheriff Hampton big enough or at least with sense and character enough to run the county and then fill the rest of the jobs with cousins and inlaws who had failed to make a living at everything else they ever tried.

I don't mean a 1905 Republican---I don't know what his Tennessee politics were, or if he had any---I mean a 1961 Republican. He was more: he was a Conservative. Like this: a Republican is a mad who made his money; a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooted Liberal in a cross-country race; a Conservative is a Republican who has learned to read and write.

The Vietnam war was wrong, rotten to the core. But the military, the government, the police, big business were all congealing in my view into a single, opressive mass -- The System, The Man. These were standard issue youth politics at the time, of course, and I was soon folding school authorities into the enemy force. And my casual, even contemptuous attitude toward the law was mostly a holdover from childhood, when a large part of glory was defiance and what you could get away with.

Reality television. It merged with politics. Then with performance art." They walked on. "I think that already happened, back home

UN's got deep roots in the demonology.

it's somehow gone sideways in a puff of what we today would call globalization, to be replaced by some less dangerous combine of large corporations and city-states.

Ain't all that simple," he said. "It's everything I been brought up to be. Can't all be bullshit, can it?" Rydell, glancing over at him, took pity. "Naw," he said, "I guess it wouldn't have to be, necessarily, all of it, but it's just—" "What they bring you all up to be, Berry?" Rydell had to think about it. "Republican," he said, finally.

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.

At 8:23 there seemed every chance of a lasting alliance starting between Florin and Guilder. At 8:24 the two nations were very close to war.

The lobby is the army of the plutocracy.

We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.