Quotes About Politics

The government had to choose between shame and war. They have chosen shame, and now they will get war.

By 1938 much of the New Deal was dead. The programs that were not killed by the Supreme Court had been killed by Congress, which had seen the election of a significant number of conservatives.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

The method of political science is the interpretation of life its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.

Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.

I will not speak with disrespect of the Republican Party. I always speak with respect of the past.

My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and discuss with absolute frankness.

A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

War isn't declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely.

A politician, a man engaged in party contests, must be an opportunist. Let us give up saying that word as if it contained a slur. If you want to win in party action, I take it for granted that you want to lure the majority to your side. I never heard of any man in his senses who was fishing for a minority.

There is more of a nation's politics to be got out of its poetry than out of all its systematic writers on public affairs and constitutions.

Once you lead [the] people into war, they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. The spirit of ruthless brutality will enter every fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.

It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.

No one set of interests can safely be suffered to dominate the country.

He never made the ten-most-wanted list. It's very unfair voting. It's who you know.

What kind of government is this? It's getting more like California all the time.

We must understand the politics of our community and we must know what politics is supposed to produce. We must know what part politics play in our lives. And until we become politically mature we will always be mislead, lead astray, or deceived or maneuvered into supporting someone politically who doesn't have the good of our community at heart.

In the North, they do it a different way. They have a system that's known as gerrymandering.... It means when Negroes become too heavily concentrated in a certain area, and begin to gain too much political power, the white man comes along and changes the district lines.

They have got a con game going on, a political con game, and you and I are in the middle. It's time for you and me to wake up and start looking at it like it is, and trying to understand it like it is; and then we can deal with it like it is.

We must control the politics and the politicians of our community. They must no longer take orders from outside forces. We will organize, and sweep out of office all Negro politicians who are puppets for the outside forces.

Truth refuses to be subservient to either politics or the market.