Quotes About Politics

I have always hated celebrities lecturing people on politics. So forgive me. But I am passionate about this country. I am equally passionate about the potential of the people who live here.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were guilty of unjustified wiretaps, and President John F. Kennedy conducted dubious wiretaps in the first month of his presidency.

Siempre habrá personas con un punto de vista distinto. En mi país tenemos demócratas y republicanos. Aquí vosotros tenéis nazis y antinazis. Eso es lo que hace que el mundo no se pare.

To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.

Politics always puts forward Ideas: Nation, Empire, Union, Economy, etc. But none of these forms has value in itself; it has it only insofar as it involves concrete individuals. If a nation can assert itself proudly only to the detriment of its members, if a union can be created only to the detriment of those it is trying to unite, the nation or the union must be rejected. We repudiate all idealisms, mysticisms, etcetera which prefer a Form to man himself.

In fact – and with very few exceptions – when a man joins a party, he submissively adopts a mental attitude which he will express later on with words such as, 'As a monarchist, as a Socialist, I think that . . .' It is so comfortable! It amounts to having no thoughts at all. Nothing is more comfortable than not having to think.

If one were to entrust the organisation of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device.

Political parties are a marvellous mechanism which, on the national scale, ensures that not a single mind can attend to the effort of perceiving, in public affairs, what is good, what is just, what is true. As a result – except for a very small number of fortuitous coincidences – nothing is decided, nothing is executed, but measures that run contrary to the public interest, to justice and to truth.

Yet no suffering befalls whoever relinquishes justice and truth, whereas the party system has painful penalties to chastise insubordination. These

When a country has political parties, sooner or later it becomes impossible to intervene effectively in public affairs without joining a party and playing the game.

Nearly everywhere- often when dealing with purely technical problems -instead of thinking, one merely takes sides- for or against. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind. This is intellectual leprosy: it originated in the political world and then spread through the land, contaminating all forms of thinking. this leprosy is killing us; it is doubtful whether it can be cured without first starting with the abolition of all political parties.

Des petites filles, attachées au gaullisme comme à l'équivalent français de l'hitlérisme, ajoutaient : la vérité est relative, même en géométrie

Comme, dans les partis politiques, il y a des démocrates qui admettent plusieurs partis, de même dans le domaine des opinions les gens larges reconnaissent une valeur aux opinions avec lesquelles ils se disent en désaccord. C'est avoir complètement perdu le sens même du vrai et du faux. D'autres, ayant pris position pour une opinion, ne consentent à examiner rien qui lui soit contraire. C'est la transposition de l'esprit totalitaire.

Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics.

He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican.

You see, we don't like murder as a way of argument—that's what really marks the Liberal!

He had expected that traditionally Republican Vermont would give him too drearily easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What he found was a dismaying preference for the theoretically Democratic Buzz Windrip. And that preference, Doremus perceived, wasn't even a pathetic trust in Windrip's promises of Utopian bliss for everyone in general. It was a trust in increased cash for the voter himself, and for his family, very much in particular.

No one, even among the Washington correspondents, seemed to know precisely how much of a part in Senator Windrip's career was taken by his secretary, Lee Sarason. When Windrip had first seized power in his state, Sarason had been managing editor of the most widely circulated paper in all that part of the country. Sarason's genesis was and remained a mystery.

We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure—wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.

Certainly Lewis failed—or refused—to sketch a solution to the threat of fascism. He was a social satirist, not a systematic political thinker or theorist. Worth

As a newspaper man, Doremus remembered that the only reporters who misrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously than the Capitalists were the Communists.

I wrote 'It Can't Happen Here,' but I began to think it certainly can.

Why, Windrip's just something nasty that's been vomited up. Plenty others still left fermenting in the stomach—quack economists with every sort of economic ptomaine! No, Buzz isn't important—it's the sickness that made us throw him up that we've got to attend to—the sickness of more than 30 per cent permanently unemployed, and growing larger. Got to cure it!

Women, she pointed out, had done nothing with the vote. If the United States had only listened to her back in 1919 she could have saved them all this trouble. No. Certainly not. No votes.