politics quotes

Abraham Lincoln: 

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

Abraham Lincoln: 

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or decisions possible or impossible to execute.

Adlai Stevenson: 

A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.

Adlai Stevenson: 

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them. [1952] 

Aesop: 

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

Albert Einstein: 

Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.

Aldous Huxley: 

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Aldous Huxley: 

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Alex Carey: 

... the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
Australian social scientist, quoted by Noam Chomsky in World Orders Old and New


Anais Nin: 

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

Angela Davis: 

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Ann Richards: 

I've always said that in politics, your enemies can't hurt you, but your friends will kill you.

Aristotle: 

Man is by nature a political animal.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: 

What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.

Benjamin Whichcote: 

Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable; the principles of it are troublesome.

Bill Moyers: 

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.

Blaise Pascal: 

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical. 

Carl Sandberg: 

A politician should have three hats. One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected.

Carl Sandburg: 

A politician should have three hats. One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected.

Carl Schurz: 

The peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: "Our country -- when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right."

Carolyn Heilbrun: 

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidentially expect utopia. Both are wrong. 

Confucius: 

To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

Dave Barry: 

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club.

David Broder: 

Anyone that wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.

Demosthenes: 

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: 

Politics are not the task of a Christian.

Edward Dowling: 

The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it. [1941]

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

Campaign behavior for wives: Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Lean back in the parade car so everybody can see the president.

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Elie Wiesel: 

It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: 

An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as two peas in the same pod.

Freda Adler: 

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

Friedrich Nietzsche: 

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, political parties, nations, and eras it's the rule.

George Bernard Shaw: 

Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things that never were and say, "Why not?"
frequently attributed to Robert F. (Bobby) Kennedy, who used it in a speech which his brother, Edward F. (Teddy) Kennedy quoted at RFK's funeral.


George Burns: 

Too bad that all the people who really know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair.

George J. Mitchell: 

Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.

George Jean Nathan: 

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.

George Orwell: 

In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

George Orwell: 

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Wilhelm Hegel: 

What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.

George Will: 

You really don't want a president who is a football fan. Football combines the worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

Goethe: 

Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.

Groucho Marx: 

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

H. G. Wells: 

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

H. L. Mencken: 

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

H. L. Mencken: 

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

H. L. Mencken: 

A good politician under democracy is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Harriet Lerner: 

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.

Harry S Truman: 

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

Henrik Ibsen: 

It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.

Hermann Goering: 

Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. quote verified at snopes.com

Hubert H. Humphrey: 

Here we are the way politics ought to be in America; the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose and the politics of joy.

James Madison: 

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.

Jane Auer: 

Voting is one of the few things where boycotting in protest clearly makes the problem worse rather than better.

Jean Goss: 

All ideologies end up killing people. If you separate love from nonviolence you turn nonviolence into an ideology, a gimmick. Structures that are not inhabited by justice and love have no liberating or reconciling force, and are never sources of life.

Jean Hollands: 

The person who says "I'm not political" is in great danger.... Only the fittest will survive, and the fittest will be the ones who understand their office's politics.

Jeff Greenfield: 

More things in politics happen by accident or exhaustion than happen by conspiracy.

Jesse Jackson: 

In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.

Jim Hightower: 

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.

Jimmy Carter: 

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

John Adams: 

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

John Adams: 

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

John F. Kennedy: 

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

John F. Kennedy: 

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John Gardner: 

The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.

John Kenneth Galbraith: 

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

John Kenneth Galbraith: 

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Johnny Carson: 

Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president.

Justice William O. Douglas: 

As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

Lily Tomlin: 

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Lily Tomlin: 

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Lord Acton: 

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the party that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

Margaret Chase Smith: 

My creed is that public service must be more than doing a job efficiently and honestly. It must be a complete dedication to the people and to the nation with full recognition that every human being is entitled to courtesy and consideration, that constructive criticism is not only to be expected but sought, that smears are not only to be expected but fought, that honor is to be earned, not bought.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests.

Mark Twain: 

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.

Mark Twain: 

Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.

Mark Twain: 

Citizenship is what makes a republic -- monarchies can get along without it.

Mark Twain: 

No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.

Mark Twain: 

Wherefore being all of one mind, we do highly resolve that government of the grafted by the grafter for the grafter shall not perish from the earth.

Mary Wollstonecraft: 

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

Michael Harrington: 

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

Mohandas Gandhi: 

The Roots of Violence: 
Wealth without work, 
Pleasure without conscience, 
Knowledge without character, 
Commerce without morality, 
Science without humanity, 
Worship without sacrifice, 
Politics without principles.

Mohandas K. Gandhi: 

Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.

Molly Ivins: 

The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

Molly Ivins: 

As a veteran of many an electoral defeat at the polls, may I remind you of the proper Texan attitude toward slaughter at the polls?

A few years before Billie Carr died this September at age 74, a friend called to ask how she was doing. "Well," she said, "They just impeached my boy up in Washington, there's not a Democrat left in statewide office in Texas, the Republicans have taken every judgeship in Harris County, and yesterday I found out I have cancer."

Pause.

"I think I'll go out and get a pregnancy test because with my luck, it'll come back positive." 

Molly Ivins: 

Good thing we've still got politics in Texas -- finest form of free entertainment ever invented.

Molly Ivins: 

Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?

Oh, it's just that your life is at stake.

Molly Ivins: 

You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to.

Nikita Krushchev: 

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.

Noam Chomsky: 

American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.

Noam Chomsky: 

If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.

Noam Chomsky: 

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

Noam Chomsky: 

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.

Oscar Levant: 

A politician is a man who will double cross that bridge when he comes to it.

Otto Van Bismarck: 

The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.

P. J. O'Rourke: 

In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.

P. J. O'Rourke: 

Then there's politics. Just imagine politics with its dumbbell element subtracted. There would be no Republican candidates. There would be no Democratic voters. The whole system would collapse.

Paul Wellstone: 

The people of this country, not special interest big money, should be the source of all political power.

Paulo Freire: 

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

Plato: 

The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

Plato: 

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

These rabble at Washington ... see, against the unanimous expression of the people, how much a little well-directed effrontery can achieve, how much crime the people will bear, and they proceed from step to step... (Journal, June 1846)

Richard M. Nixon: 

Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people.

Robert Coles: 

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Robert Frost: 

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Robert Louis Stevenson: 

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

Robert M. Hutchins: 

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Saul Alinsky: 

As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.

Sinclair Lewis: 

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.

Thomas Jefferson: 

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Thomas Jefferson: 

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.

Thomas Jefferson: 

Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations,—entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns, and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the general government in its whole constitutional vigour, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; …freedom of religion; freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected, — these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.

Thomas Jefferson: 

If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

Thomas Jefferson: 

A politician looks forward only to the next election. A statesman looks forward to the next generation.

Thomas Jefferson: 

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

Vaclav Havel: 

Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.

Wendell Phillips: 

Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.

Will Rogers: 

Everything is changing. People are taking the comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke

Will Rogers: 

Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials.

Will Rogers: 

Politics is the best show in America. I love animals and I love politicians and I love to watch both of 'em play either back home in their native state or after they have been captured and sent to the zoo or to Washington.

Will Rogers: 

I love a dog. He does nothing for political reasons.

Winston Churchill: 

No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.