Quotes About Politics

I intend to open this country up to democracy and anyone who is against that I will jail, I will crush."—João Baptista Figueiredo, President of Brazil (1979)

Little boy crying. "My daddy has been dead for 10 yrs, but he came to town to vote for Lyndon Johnson, and didn't come to see me.

To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they feel together.

Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power.

This will rule out working in groups larger than a handful of people—above a certain number, political considerations inevitably rise to the surface. This means working for yourself or on very small startups.

They had to serve their masters, but if they seemed to fawn, if they curried favor too obviously, the other courtiers around them would notice and would act against them.

Mao actually encouraged China's disagreements with the Soviet Union and the United States; without clear-cut enemies, he believed, his people would lose any sense of what Chinese Communism meant. A sharply defined enemy is a far stronger argument for your side than all the words you could possibly put together.

Be extra careful in the work environment with those who like to maintain their position through charm and being political, rather than by getting things done.

The formation of proper alliances was in some ways a more important art than that of warfare itself, and the statesmen adept at this art were more powerful than military leaders.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. [ West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette , 319 U.S. 624 (1943)]

Power depended on being in the room when the decisions were taken.

Sometimes, he said, summing up the discussion with an aphorism I have never forgotten, if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight--start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.

What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!

Since when has idiocy been a bar to advancement in politics?

if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight—start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.

There are no lasting victories in politics, there is only the remorseless grinding forward of events.

Politics is a country idiot capable of concentrating on only one thing at a time.

Problems do not queue up outside a statesman's door, waiting to be solved in an orderly fashion, chapter by chapter, as the books would have us believe; instead they crowd in en masse, demanding attention.

was yet another lesson to me in politics—an occupation which, if it is to be pursued successfully, demands the most extraordinary reserves of self-discipline, a quality that the naive often mistake for hypocrisy.

He had learned well from Cicero the tricks of political campaigning: keep your speeches short, remember names, tell jokes, put on a show; above all, render an issue, however complex, into a story anyone can grasp.

The trouble with Lucious, he said, putting his feet up on the desk after this cousin has gone, is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.

siempre se puede decir una cosa de la política: jamás permanece estática. Si los buenos tiempos no duran eternamente, los malos tampoco.

It is in the nature of things that not all politicians can achieve greatness.

The trouble with Lucius," he said, putting his feet up on the desk after his cousin had gone, "is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.