Quotes About Politics

I just don't see why having these powers makes it necessary for all of us to become politicians, warriors, social workers, whatever. We would have tried it before if we really wanted to do it. None of us chose to spend our lives helping people before we got our powers - why should we do it now? Because comics say we should?

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

Party men always hate a slightly differing friend more than a downright enemy.

Small countries have to come to terms with great ones. Hitler had the power; thus some of his demands had to be accepted.

Es que el otro día leí en El Tiempo que los colombianos no tenemos educación política. Por eso a mí me gusta sacar el tema de vez en cuando, a ver qué aprendo. —Pues no sé, el problema es que yo también soy colombiano.

I think it's your civic obligation to be utterly fucking furious about politics.

When people receive gifts, no matter how innocent, they feel obligated and try to reciprocate. It is a lovely reflex in everyday life and has furthered community bonding and artistic vocation. But in politics, it leads to corruption. An outright ban on such gifts would protect officials from the unintended worst consequences of their best reflexes—and from the temptations that will inevitably be dangled before them.

In the U.S.A., we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues. . . No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of mourn together, suffer together. City on a hill, though -- that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that's why the citizens of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that's why we ARE Ronald Reagan.

Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1778 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, an entire generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, 'This is your Fourth of July, not mine'.

After Dickinson and Adams had it out over the Olive Branch Petition, Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, that he and Dickinson "are not to be on speaking terms." How sad is it that this tiff sort of cheers me up? If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public servants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congressional blockheads to get along?

If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public servants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congressional blockheads to get along?

How sad is it that this tiff sort of cheers me up? If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public servants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congressional blockheads to get along? While

Oh, if only that was the last time in America that the extreme left and extreme right broke down and made a mess of things, leaving everyone in the center to suffer.

Jeff Davis's name they'll proudly praise, ah ha, ah ha And Lincoln's tomb will be disgraced, ah ha, ah ha The nation's flag will lose its stars The stripes they'll change to rebel bars And we'll all wear gray if the Johnnies get into power

For the better part of the 1990s, it seemed like the only Americans who publicly described themselves as patriots were scary militia types hiding out in the backwoods of Michigan and Montana, cleaning their guns.

I like to call him the current president because it's a hopeful phrase, implying that his administration is only temporary.

To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.

Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.

Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain

me for years that democrats take a low view of themselves, and are brought up to believe they're insignificant. But turn that around and you come out with megalomania, and we've seen plenty of examples of that too.

A bit of ideology and being up to date is most apropos," Chekhov said—tongue in cheek, I suspect. In a more serious vein, he wrote that writers "should engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics.

Anyone who wants to govern the country, has to entertain it.

He turned out to be right. Grielescu had attached himself to the Nazis, not to the milder, Italian form of fascism.

Ben-David knows a lot about the lives of Jews from the Arab countries. He often makes the point that they, too, are refugees who fled from persecution and whose property was confiscated. World opinion concentrates on the Palestinian refugees while these Oriental Jews—nearly a million of them—are given no consideration. It is inevitable that he and I should turn to politics. Sightseeing is all very well, but our heads are full of news, omens, and speculations.