Quotes About Politics

Whenever you hear a politician start a sentence with, "If we can put a man on the moon . . . ," grab your wallet.

These days, every politician is a laughing-stock, and the laughter which occasionally used to illuminate the dark corners of the political world with dazzling, unexpected shafts of hilarity has become an unthinking reflex on our part, a tired Pavlovian reaction to situations that are too difficult or too depressing to think about clearly.

To the privileged, equality feels like a step down. Understand this and you understand a lot of populist politics today.' ?yad el-Baghdadi, Twitter, 1:36 p.m., 25 July 2016

In an age when politicians are judged first of all on personality, when the public assumes all of them to be deceitful, and when it's easier and much more pleasurable to laugh about a political issue than to think about it, Johnson's apparent self-deprecating honesty and lack of concern for his own dignity were bound to make him a hit.

Where are the laughs in massacre, famine and climate change, exactly? What's so funny about the Middle East, North Korea and Afghanistan? Who's going to chuckle when they pick up the London Review of Books and find John Lanchester arguing, convincingly as always, that the banking habits of the British people pose a greater threat to their own security than terrorism?

You shouldn't take notice of anything that Henry tells you, you know,' he now says, with a chilly smile. 'After all, he is a politician.

According to de Gaulle's account, Blum assured him of his interest in the soldier's ideas. 'But you fought against them,' his visitor observed. 'One changes one's point of view when one becomes head of the government,' came the reply.

Outside, the middle class was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other religiously, but inside, disruptive new technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete.

Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.

The country as a whole had become so hostile to the have-nots that large numbers of the have-nots themselves now voted against their own economic interests.

If I were fashioning my own killer argument against the digital revolution, I'd begin with the observation that both Newt Gingrich and Timothy Leary are crazy about it.

I hate America," she said. "I thought Obama would change things, but it's still just guns, drones, Guant

People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.

Of] particular importance is the relationship between education and the political process.

She hated this feeling, the sensation of trying and failing to get her arms around something big. The way political opinions seemed always to be expressed with a total sureness of tone. The way that sureness was at odds with every true thought she'd ever had.

Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!

Hitler was a vegetarian.

is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent practice, when one prince desires the assistance of another, to secure him against an invasion, that the assistant, when he has driven out the invader, should seize on the dominions himself, and kill, imprison, or banish, the prince he came to relieve. 

When a great office is vacant, either by death or disgrace (which often happens,) five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his majesty and the court with a dance on the rope; and whoever jumps the highest, without falling, succeeds in the office.

No digo esto con la más pequeña intención de disminuir las muchas virtudes de aquel excelente rey, cuyos méritos, sin embargo, temo que habrán de quedar muy mermados a los ojos del lector inglés con este motivo; pero juzgo que este defecto tiene por origen la ignorancia de aquel pueblo, que todavía no ha reducido la política a una ciencia

they have been troubled with the same disease to which the whole race of mankind is subject; the nobility often contending for power, the people for liberty, and the King for absolute dominion. All which, however happily tempered by the laws of that Kingdom, have been sometimes violated by each of the three parties

He then desired to know, "What arts were practised in electing those whom I called commoners: whether a stranger, with a strong purse, might not influence the vulgar voters to choose him before their own landlord, or the most considerable gentleman in the neighbourhood?

os nossos historiógrafos, há seis mil luas, não fazem referência a outras regiões senão aos dois grandes impérios de Lilipute e de Blefuscu. Estas duas poderosas potências têm, como ia dizendo, andado empenhadas, durante trinta e seis luas, numa guerra

La tensión de algo que se veía venir, algo irracional porque venía untado de violencia, imbécil porque tenía su origen en la política, cruel porque en ello había metido la mano la religión.