Quotes About Politics

If you can't come into a room and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics.

Hospitality has always been a potent political weapon. Moses used it like a master. Coupled with his overpowering personality, a buffet often did as much for a proposal as a bribe.

Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.

Decades of the seniority rule had conferred influence in the Senate not on men who broke new ground but on men who were careful not to.

established foreign correspondents, set up the first Washington bureau, and employed the newly invented telegraph to get the news first from everywhere the lines reached. Now the news-not politics-ranked first in importance. Bennett did not hesitate to be political, but he did it primarily on his editorial page. Six years after the Herald appeared, Horace Greeley started the New York Tribune. Greeley was followed

Both Caligula and Abraham Lincoln sought power, yet it is highly implausible to suppose that Caligula and Lincoln were driven by the same motives.

The human race divides itself politically into those who want to be controlled, and those who have no such desire

Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.

I don't dream about the President any more, and when I talk to my friends, I find they don't either. The Great Leader is a hollow man, the Law of the Market cannot prove itself, and the Nation State mocks its own values.

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Government.... the scariest thing we face every Halloween... every day of every year!

In 1980, the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans provided 10 percent of contributions to federal elections. By 2012, they provided 40 percent. The Supreme Court has made all this worse through a series of decisions holding that money is speech under the First Amendment and corporations are people.

I know it's hard to imagine, but even a president of the United States could act like Shkreli

Don't assume that we're locked in a battle between capitalism and socialism. We already have socialism—for the very rich. Most Americans are subject to harsh capitalism.

people who believe the game is rigged are easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas.

The problem is not the size of government but whom the government is for.

As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized, those who argue for "less government" are really arguing for a different government—often one that favors them or their patrons.1

The biggest political divide in America today is not between Republicans and Democrats. It's between democracy and oligarchy. Hearing and using the same old labels prevents most people from noticing they're being shafted.

If nothing is done to counter present trends, the major fault line in American politics will no longer be between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. It will be between the "establishment"--political insiders, power brokers, the heads of American business, Wall Street, and the mainstream media--and an increasingly mad-as-hell populace determined to "take back America" from them.

The most important political competition over the next decades will not be between the right and left or between Republicans and Democrats. It will be between a majority of Americans who have been losing ground and an economic elite that refuses to recognize or respond to the majority's growing distress.

There are no longer moderates. There's no longer a center. There's either authoritarian populism (Trump) or democratic populism (represented in 2016 by Bernie's "political revolution").

I give money to everybody, even the Clintons, because that's how the system works," Trump said in 2016. Those might have been the most honest words ever to come out of his mouth.

for small donors to participate, but large donors continue to dominate.) Even before the Supreme Court's grotesque 2010 decision

Moreover, people who believe the game is rigged are easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas.