Quotes About Politics

David Herbert Donald

the state never voted for a Whig candidate for President

Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.

Extensive conquests, when pursued, must be the ruin of every free government

It is, therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.

Thomas Hobbes's politics are fitted only to promote tyranny, and his ethics to encourage licentiousness.

It may . . . be pronounced as an universal axiom in politics, That an hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals, and a people voting by their representatives, form the best monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.

It is well known, that every government must come to a period, and that death is unavoidable to the political as well as to the animal body.

In all governments, there is a perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between authority and liberty; and neither of them can ever absolutely prevail in the contest.

So great is the force of laws, and of particular forms of government, and so little dependence have they on the humors and tempers of men, that consequences almost as general and certain may sometimes be deduced from them, as any which the mathematical sciences afford us. . . . It may . . . be pronounced as an universal axiom in politics, That an hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals, and a people voting by their representatives, form the best monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.

The pope, aware that he had already angered Mussolini with his three telegrams, would do no more.

the Vatican's cooperation.

the moral leadership of the Papacy is conditioned by considerations of opportunism and expedience.

the National Socialists were divided into pro-church and anti-church factions that were "bitterly opposed to each other.

how much he admired the pope's ability to craft his speeches in a way that ensured they would offend no one.

The morons in government worldwide are extraordinary in both number and depth of moronity.

Si je veux que vous me donniez le pouvoir et que vous me supportiez lors d'une élection, est-ce que je dois vous dire ce que vous voulez entendre ou vous dire ce que vous ne voulez pas entendre ?

Obama is so crooked it is a wonder he can walk straight.

And you realized, once inside the Secret Service cordon, that the president of the United States was just a politician, surrounded by courtiers and glad-handers and people seeking favors. He was as prone to making stupid decisions as any other politician, maybe more so. The real secret about the White House was that it was so ordinary—mediocrity on steroids.

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. —Marcus Tullius Cicero

This was the beginning of Hitler's new-style diplomacy. His victories in Central Europe were won without the sword – they were won by power politics and opportunism, by bluff, by coercion, by psychological operations and by nerve-war. On each occasion he carefully gauged his potential enemies. He satisfied himself that the western powers would not fight, provided he made each claim sound reasonable enough. The west was weak and unready, and he was not.

Patrick) Henry rightly understood that the moral condition of the American people was a direct product of their religious faith, and that politics and morality were inevitably intertwined. Thus, the political structure ultimately rested on a religious foundation. The "great pillars of all government and of social life, "Henry once observed, are virtue, morality, and religion.

Barack confessed that "during the course of campaigning" "sometimes you lose" your "core truthfulness" and "it becomes a performance