Quotes About Politics

El guiar al pueblo no es cosa de un hombre culto ni de buenos principios, sino de un ignorante y bellaco (Los caballeros, 424 aC)

A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he must be ignorant and a rogue.

Aussi, dans la démocratie, les pauvres sont-ils souverains à l'exclusion des riches, parce qu'ils sont les plus nombreux, et que l'avis de la majorité fait loi. Voilà donc un des caractères distinctifs de la liberté ; et les partisans de la démocratie ne manquent pas d'en faire une condition indispensable de l'État.

Democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Man is a political animal. A man who lives alone is either a Beast or a God

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

The government is everywhere sovereign in the state, and the constitution is in fact the government.

He who is a citizen in a democracy will often not be a citizen in an oligarchy.

The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of which his Politics is the other half. Both deal with one and the same subject. This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the philosophy of human affairs; but more frequently Political or Social Science.

It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election. -- Aristotle, Politics, Book IV

the fact that it took the rise of democracies and otherwise open societies at Athens and elsewhere to create the climate in which public eloquence became a political indispensability.

Human beings are by nature political animals

Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, and many which appear to be oligarchical are the ruin of oligarchies. Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state.

The student of politics must study the soul.

As in other departments of science, so in politics, the compound should always be resolved into the simple elements or least parts of the whole.

Correct habituation distinguishes a good political system from a bad one.

All those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics.

Democracy, he explains, is the government not of the many but of the poor; oligarchy a government not of the few but of the rich.

El cuerpo político sólo debe componerse de ciudadanos armados. En cuanto al censo, no es posible fijar la cantidad de una manera absoluta e invariable; pero debe dársele la base más ancha posible, para que el número de los que tengan parte en el gobierno sobrepuje al de los que queden excluidos de él.

Pero si estos funcionarios son pocos, la institución es oligárquica; y como los comisarios no pueden ser nunca muchos, la institución pertenece esencialmente a la oligarquía.

State comes into being for the sake of living, but it exists for the sake of living well.

Com toda certeza, os antigos tiranos originaram-se dos demagogos.

For political science does not make men, but takes them from nature and uses them; and nature provides them with food from different elements of earth, air, or sea.