Quotes About Politics

In fact, if your investment is not over $5 million, it's hard to get anyone in the government to become interested in your property.

Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ? Vladimir Ilich Lenin

Permitting businesses and special interests to fund political campaigns encourages demagoguery and invites corruption. That is not government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It's government of, by, and for money.

We must ask ourselves: what should we demand of ourselves, given the imperfections of politics and the disappointments of history.

It is part of the received doctrine of modern biography that all characters are Flawed, and as a Christian priest I am quite ready to agree, but the Flaws the biographers exhibited usually meant that the person under discussion had not seen eye to eye with the biographer on matters of politics, or social betterment, or something impersonal.

More recently, faculty at the University of Texas condemned "Western Civilization" courses as inherently right wing, and Yale even returned a $20 million contribution rather than reinstate the course.

This 'shocking realism'52 has often surprised and upset Augustine's readers. But, given the immense authority of the writer, this view shaped Christian political sensibilities ever after: Christian writers could not condemn suggestions for liberalizing the state, or even for dispensing with monarchies. Moreover, by affirming the secularity of kingship the Church made it possible to examine the basis for worldly power and the interplay of rights and rule.

As suggested by this definition, not all nations are states and not all states are nations.

Tanks could not solve what was essentially a political problem. If the revolution in Afghanistan could only be sustained with Soviet bayonets, that was a route down which the Soviet Union should not go.

In fact, Professor Showalter's proposals provide a sterling illustration of the way in which feminism has provided a kind of blueprint for special interests that wish to appropriate the curriculum in order to achieve political goals.

I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth.

Left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture. The two goals of liberation and social justice remain in place: but they are promoted by legislation, committees and government commissions empowered to root out the sources of discrimination. Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized.

I believed that 'freedom' is not a clear or sufficient answer to the question of what conservatives believe in. Like Matthew Arnold, I held that 'freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere'.

The American liberal is certainly not averse to the power of the state, provided it is exerted by liberals, and exerted against conservatives.

The greatest task on the right, therefore, is to rescue the language of politics: to put within our grasp what has been forcibly removed from it by jargon.

The worst mistake in politics is the mistake made by Lenin – the mistake of destroying the institutions and procedures whereby mistakes can be recognized. Something

was calculated to kill off democracy.

John O'Sullivan has forcefully argued that the simultaneous presence in the highest offices of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II was the cause of the Soviet collapse.3 And my own experience confirms this.

I have argued that the political process, as we in Western democracies have inherited it, depends upon citizenship, which in turn depends upon a viable first-person plural. And in the previous chapter I gave what to me are incontrovertible arguments for construing that first-person plural in national terms. No such first-person plural can emerge in a society divided against itself, in which local antagonisms and class war eclipse every understanding of a shared destiny.

Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.

Gradually this truth is beginning to dawn on the political class, so that even socialists have come to accept that the poor are not helped by taking revenge against the rich, but by opening the doors to social advancement. Since

This law is implanted in us by reason, and God himself obeys it. If human beings do not obey the natural law it is because reason does not entirely govern their behavior. The purpose of a legal is to provide an effective substitute for reason in the motives of unreasonable men. He added, however, that rights are nothing without the power which would enforce them, and therefore that power, not right, is the basic fact of politics." -Spinoza

Hegel, that the intellectual life is ultimately a spiritual endeavour to synthesize art, music, religion, politics and philosophy

Democracies have a natural tendency to turn against their saviours. It happened to Winston Churchill. It happened to Charles de Gaulle and it happened to Margaret Thatcher. It was not the faults of those great leaders that caused their downfall, but their virtues