Quotes About Politics

I think that politics could be a positive thing. My beef is that people focus on the personal aspect of a politician too much. They should focus on the results.

[To Dan Quayle:] Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.

All rising to great place is by a winding stair; and if there be factions, it is good to side a man's self whilst he is in the rising, and to balance himself when he is placed.

in Woodhull's home state of Ohio, he came from the American heartland. The electorate had endowed him with an authenticity to which Woodhull could respond. She had paved her way to the White House

I could see that between the two regimes, the Pahlavis must now seem infinitely preferable to the reality of the Islamic Republic. If oppression is a dish that must be served with a side order, then let it be glamour and excess rather than religion and hypocrisy.

Yes, yes, our countries are going to be friends, at last!' I didn't bother pointing out the minor detail that Obama wasn't my president. It didn't seem important. American, British, whatever. Great Satan, Little Satan, we had all been merged into one by the Islamic Republic's propaganda machine. No different from how Persians and Arabs are all one and the same in many western minds, I supposed.

My mother, she was twenty in 1979, she supported Khomeini, she wanted to throw out the Shah. But now she cries all the time. Ten times a day she says to me, what did I do? What did I do? It wasn't meant to be like this. But there is nothing we can do.

Khomeini and Khamenei were everywhere; on giant billboards at the roadside, as vast lurid murals on concrete apartment blocks and, less impressively, on sagging vinyl banners outside schools and mosques. With their almost identical appearance and surnames they reminded me of an Islamic Thomson and Thompson, the hapless detectives of the Tintin books. But that, I feared, was where the similarity ended.

I'd noticed that in Britain and America the word Persian is generally used for the 'nice' things: Persian carpets, Persian food and restaurants, poetry and art, that kind of thing. But when it comes to talking about politics, and say, the nuclear programme or human rights, anything that the western media considers intimidating or distasteful, then it's 'Iran' and 'Iranian'.

Many of the passengers were a generation or two older than me, men and women who would remember the pre-revolution era; they had probably supported the overthrow of the Shah at the time. Considering that over ninety-eight per cent of the population had voted for the creation of an Islamic Republic back in 1979, it was highly likely that most of these quiet, tea-drinking folk around me had ticked the YES box in that fateful referendum. I wondered if they regretted that decision now.

Socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic and political system whereby more men can get food to eat.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the party that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians.

From the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.

The Liberal party is held together, not by forces within, but by a force above it. It consists, like the being that declined a chair, of two wings and a head.

Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith.

I have no consistency, except in politics and that probably arises from my indifference to the subject altogether.

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

What's good for reform is bad for the reformers

I don't like to talk about things where you're going to gt one side or the other unhappy. My music has no politics.