Quotes About Politics

The diplomats were at their customary business of making the world safe for new wars.

Even forty years ago we had good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a million and show what we are made of. Sometimes I wish I'd been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy.

Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy.

For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy.

Communism as I see it has no place in the United States, and the American people will not stand for its teachings.

I found out I got ringworm from Felix. If it gets in my head, they will have to shave off my hair. I'll be bald just like Eisenhower, and I am a Democrat.

Well, they are trying to get rid of Christianity and once they do that, then you watch. Our taxes will go up and they'll take all our guns away and the next thing you know, a communist or a socialist will get in the White House and then it will be all over.

In the Middle East today there are too many people consumed by political dreams and too few interested in practical plans. That is why, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's line about the Balkans, the region produces more history than it consumes.

The American political system has lost the ability for large-scale compromise, and it has lost the ability to accept some pain now for much gain later on.

America has become what Francis Fukuyama calls a "vetocracy." The system of checks and balances, replicated at every level of government, ensures that someone, somewhere can always block any positive action. The United States has become a nation of naysayers.

The real test for the United States is political—and it rests not just with America at large but with Washington in particular.

Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are far more important symbols than any politician today, and they occupy the space that iconic political figures did in earlier eras.

If money can buy a better house or car or even a yacht, that's one thing. But if it can buy citizenship, special access to public spaces, preferential treatment at colleges, and favors from politicians, it becomes a corrupting and corroding force.

Without credit default swaps, there might never have been a President Donald Trump.

Lenin is supposed to have once said

Even though the roots of the crash lay in the excesses of the private sector, in many countries, people did not move to the left economically; they moved to the right culturally.

America is, in its DNA, an anti-statist country. The Right comes at it by defunding government. The Left does it by encumbering it with so many rules and requirements that it has a similar dysfunctional effect. As the political theorist Samuel Huntington once explained, power in America is not divided, as is often said, but rather shared and contested, so that you need broad agreement and compromise to get anything done.

Having voted in ways that ensure gridlock, Americans point to that very gridlock and despair that any good can come from Washington.

deconstruction of the administrative state." For four decades, America has largely been run by people who openly pledge to destroy the very government they lead.

For four decades, America has largely been run by people who openly pledge to destroy the very government they lead. Is it any wonder that they have succeeded?

The tragedy for the millions of new lower-caste voters is that their representatives, for whom they dutifully vote en masse, have looted the public coffers and become immensely rich and powerful while mouthing slogans about the oppression of their people.

Looking at the shape of international politics in the future, it's clear—bipolarity is inevitable. A cold war is a choice.

Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist, provides the most useful definition of populism: an ideology "that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups: 'the pure people' and 'the corrupt elite,' and argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.

For the twentieth century, the great political debate was about the size and role of government in the economy—the quantity of government. But what seems to have mattered most in this crisis was the quality of government.