Quotes About Politics

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then--we elected them.

I'm not going to assume liberals are stupid, as they do with conservatives. No, I'll attribute it instead to more fraud and deceit.

The real issue, as far as Democrats are concerned, is the number of people receiving something from the government. This is exactly what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had in mind when he created this monster. And Clinton is planning to expand it beyond Roosevelt's wildest dreams.

Racist -- a person who wins an argument with a liberal.

The way liberals are interpreting the First Amendment today is that it prevents anyone who is religious from being in government. They say that violates the prohibition against church and state.

The Eighties proved we don't need liberals.

The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they're not liberals.

Feminazis have adopted abortion as a kind of sacrament for their religion/politics of alienation and bitterness.

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

knew as well as any American that America was shipping oil and scrap iron to Tokyo to bomb Chinese women and children.

You say [slavery] is wrong; but don't you constantly object to anybody else saying so? Do you not constantly argue that this is not the right place to oppose it? You say it must not be opposed in the free States, because slavery is not there; it must not be opposed in the slave States, because it is there; it must not be opposed in politics, because that will make a fuss; it must not be opposed in the pulpit, because it is not religion. Then where is the place to oppose it?

Received as I am by the members of a legislature the majority of whom do not agree with me in political sentiments, I trust that I may have their assistance in piloting the ship of state through this voyage, surrounded by perils as it is; for if it should suffer wreck now, there will be no pilot ever needed for another voyage.

I am a patient man--always willing to forgive on the Christian terms of repentance, and also to give ample time for repentance. Still, I must save this government, if possible. What I cannot do, of course I will not do, but it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.

The slave-breeders and slave-traders are a small, odious, and detested class among you; and yet in politics they dictate the course of all of you, and are as completely your masters as you are the master of your own negroes.

I see the signs of the approaching triumph of the Republicans in the bearing of their political adversaries. A great deal of their war with us nowadays is mere bushwhacking.

Judge Douglas and I have made perhaps forty speeches apiece, and we have now for the fifth time met face to face to debate, and up to this day I have not found either Judge Douglas or any friend of his taking hold of the Republican platform or laying his finger upon anything in it that is wrong.

Judge Douglas has said to you that he has not been able to get from me an answer to the question whether I am in favor of negro citizenship. So far as I know, the judge has never asked me the question before.

I take it these people have some sense; they see plainly that Judge Douglas is playing cuttlefish, a small species of fish that has no mode of defending itself when pursued except by throwing out a black fluid, which makes the water so dark the enemy cannot see it, and thus it escapes.

In human life, there is often a discrepancy between public (announced) goals and private (unspoken) goals. Thus, a politician's announced goal is usually to serve public need. The real goal is often to get elected, to serve ambition, and to satisfy greed.

So the justices could plausibly assume that the decision they were about to hand down would meet with general public approval—as in fact it initially did, before the abortion issue became entangled, later in the 1970s, with partisan politics and the rise of the religious Right.

It was always about abortion. (185)

Only a few stories about Heraclitus' life have survived, and it's not always clear whether they're true. In one tale he sat in front of the famous temple of Artemis playing dice with a group of children. When several Ephesian statesmen expressed their shock to find him wasting his time this way, he snapped, "Why are you so surprised, you asses? I'm better off here with these stupid kids than with you and your politics!

In the new era of identity politics, Moore became the wrong kind of woman with whom to identify. Little did Rich and her adherents imagine in the 1970s and '80s that the fatherless Moore had been reared by lesbians and educated by feminists.

In both London and Washington, and at the UN in New York, there were politicians and civil servants who took decisions that cost the lives of an incalculable number of people. They should bear full responsibility for those decisions.