c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
…there is not a day of my life that I am not critiquing myself to see if my politics are borne out in the way that I live and the way that I talk and present myself.
— bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
These people look upon inequality as upon an evil. They do not assert that a definitedegree of inequality which can be exactly determined by a judgment free of anyarbitrariness and personal evaluation is good and has to be preserved unconditionally.They, on the contrary, declare inequality in itself as bad and merely contend that alower degree of it is a lesser evil than a higher degree in the same sense in which asmaller quantity of poison in a man’s body is a lesser evil than a larger dose. But ifthis is so, then there is logically in their doctrine no point at which the endeavorstoward equalization would have to stop. Whether one has already reached a degree ofinequality which is to be considered low enough and beyond which it is not necessaryto embark upon further measures toward equalization is just a matter of personaljudgments of value, quite arbitrary, different with different people and changing in thepassing of time. As these champions of equalization appraise confiscation and“redistribution” as a policy harming only a minority, viz., those whom they considerto be “too” rich, and benefiting the rest—the majority—of the people, they cannotoppose any tenable argument to those who are asking for more of this allegedlybeneficial policy. As long as any degree of inequality is left, there will always bepeople whom envy impels to press for a continuation of the equalization policy.Nothing can be advanced against their inference: If inequality of wealth and incomesis an evil, there is no reason to acquiesce in any degree of it, however low;equalization must not stop before it has completely leveled all individuals’ wealth andincomes.
— Ludwig von Mises, Economic Freedom and Interventionism
A government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom, morality, and humanity.
— Michael Moore
Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.
— George Orwell, 1984
As ever, the original inhabitants of Turtle Island are entirely overlooked. Mysteriously, the only time indigenous people are guaranteed a mainstream Amerikkan mention is on Thanksgiving. Again, to contextualize, this would be be kinda like someone busting into your house and robbing you blind, then sending you postcards once a year to remind you how much they are enjoying all of your stuff, and getting annoyed with you if you don't respond with appreciation for their thoughtfulness.
— Inga Muscio, Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in a Racist, Imperialist Society
The German experience brings us face to face with the major problem of the revolution in Western Europe. In these countries, the old bourgeois mode of production and the centuries-old civilisation which has developed with it have completely impressed themselves upon the thoughts and feelings of the popular masses. Hence, the mentality and inner character of the masses here is quite different from that in the countries of the East, who have not experienced the rule of bourgeois culture; and this is what distinguishes the different courses that the revolution has taken in the East and the West.
— Anton Pannekoek
It was as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister.
— Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth
He who suffers wins in politics. The martyr does not obtain the victory personally, but his group, his successors, win in the long run.
— Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
Henry KissingerHow I'm missing yerYou're the Doctor of my dreamsWith your crinkly hair and your glassy stareAnd your Machiavellian schemesI know they say that you are very vainAnd short and fat and pushyBut at least you're not insaneHenry KissingerHow I'm missing yerAnd wishing you were hereHenry KissingerHow I'm missing yerYou're so chubby and so neatWith your funny clothes and your squishy noseYou're like a German parakeetAll right so people say that you don't careBut you've got nicer legs than HitlerAnd bigger tits than CherHenry KissingerHow I'm missing yerAnd wishing you were here
— Graham Chapman
Intelligence is power
—  it is the flame behind the spark of intrigue
My own father had always said the measure of a man wasn't how many times or how hard he got knocked down, but how fast he got back up. I made a pledge to myself that I would get up and emerge from this debacle better for having gone through it. I would live up to the expectation I had for myself. I would be the kind of man I wanted to be.
— Joe Biden, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics
He was a consummate politician-- which is to say he was given to expedient speech and lacked even a vestigial spine.
— Nick Taylor, The Disagreement
If you're going to play the game properly you'd better know every rule.
— Barbara Jordan
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
— Alfred E. Smith
Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.
— G.K. Chesterton
Latinos are here to stay. As citizen Raquel, I'm proud to be Latina.
— Raquel Welch
Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy….The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities…To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back.
— G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America
ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realized that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot?...For a thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? …At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; nobody talks about repeal.
— G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status. The rights to life, liberty, and property are cultural inventions that function, in part, to keep males from killing and stealing from one another while they compete to attract sexual partners.
— Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
What do you mean by sound government?'Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the individual life.'Then we haven't got sound government.
— P.D. James
The revolution in global communications thus forces all nations to reconsider traditional ways of thinking about national sovereignty.
— George Shultz
All varieties of the producers' policy are advocated on the ground of their alleged ability to raise the party members' standard of living. Protectionism and economic self-sufficiency, labor union pressure and compulsion, labor legislation, minimum wage rates, public spending, credit expansion, subsidies, and other makeshifts are always recommended by their advocates as the most suitable or the only means to increase the real income of the people for whose votes they canvass. Every contemporary statesman or politician invariably tells his voters: My program will make you as affluent as conditions may permit, while my adversaries' program will bring you want and misery.
— Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it would interfere to create a great evil; and I am not going to be turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless botherations about Socialism and Individualism, or the relative advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the left.
— G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
When you listen to G. T. Stoop, you understand the importance of being a honorable person, you get charged to fight for the truth, you get angry that so many politicians are playing games with people's trust.
— Joan Bauer, Hope Was Here
In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don't want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf.On the other hand, they demand that the president 'take control.' They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage.They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn't control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn't make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn't want cuts, wants change and doesn't want change.
— David Brooks
Governments will be provided with the choice of either accommodating themselves to co-ordinating proliferating human variety or seeking to reduce that variety by repressive measures.
— Peter J. Carroll, Liber Null and Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic
If the U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, they cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. On 9/11/2001, Americans noticed that payback can be a real motherfucker.
— Ward Churchill
When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.
— Steve Erickson, American Nomad: Restless Politics in a Secret Country
But one immediate thing can be done right now, and that is: lower the temperature. Any way you can, and everybody. Just lower it.
— Peggy Noonan
With the single exception of the American Revolution, the aftermath of all revolutions from 1789 on only worsened the human condition.
— Arnold Beichman
Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.
— Warren Buffett
McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
If you do politics the right way, I believe, you can actually make people's lives better. And integrity is the minimum ante to get into the game.
— Joe Biden, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics
Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace. 
— Reinhold Niebuhr
As the nation divided into Federalists and Republicans, each group called the other the worst name possible: "party". Most Americans feared the idea of party; believing that a society should unite to achieve the public good, they denounced parties as groups of ambitious men selfishly competing for power. Worse, parties were danger signals for a republic; if parties dominated a republic's politics, its days were numbered.
— R.B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson
If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.
— Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887
It was starting to seem to her that being "forward-thinking" too often involved avoiding any kind of thought at all - especially about things that might benefit from a great deal of thinking.
— Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue
Observe this fact: in the history of mankind, every ruler who has lacked personal greatness has been forced to compensate for the deficiency by setting up the executioner at his right hand like a guardian angel
— Alfred de Vigny, Stello
People tell me that Senator Edwards got picked for his good looks, his sex appeal, and his great hair. I say to them, 'How do you think I got the job?
— Dick Cheney
To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the foot of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down. 
— Joe Biden, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics
In the evening [the Iraqi interim governor of Maysan province] asked me for fifty dollars to repair his windows, which had been destroyed in a recent demonstration. Although he was the governor, his salary was only four hundred and fifty dollars a month, and Baghdad had still not agreed to give the governors an independent budget.... For the sake of a tiny sum of money - a couple thousand dollars a month from the hundred billion we had spent on the invasion - we were alienating our key partner and successor. p. 264
— Rory Stewart, The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
We must have public officials who will stand up and tell the people exactly what they think... Our failure in recent years has not been the failure of the people to meet the challenges placed before them, but rather the failure of both our great political parties to place those challenges honestly and courageously before the people, and to trust the willingness of the people to do the things that really need to be done.
— Joe Biden, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics
Leaders say "no" to corruption. Anyone playing a role in governance, and is not ready to do this is not a leader.
— Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Ladder
We spent time on Burma and the need for the military regime there to understand that they shouldn't fear the voices of people. And yet they do.
— George W. Bush
Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but in all levels of society.
— David McCullough, 1776
The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with. 
— Eleanor Holmes Norton
Those who believe that where great personages are concerned new favors cause old injuries to be forgotten deceive themselves.
— Niccolò Machiavelli
We're all in this together.
— Paul Waldman
Without an opportunity, their abilities would have been wasted, and without their abilities, the opportunity would have arisen in vain.
— Niccolò Machiavelli
International Relations are too important to be left to the specialists.
— Karl Wolfgang Deutsch
I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term 'Holocaust' had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.
— Phillip Adams
We cannot move forward if we allow the past to pull us back.
— Rodrigo Duterte
One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.
— Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
The decline of geography in academia is easy to understand: we live in an age of ever-increasing specialization, and geography is a generalist's discipline. Imagine the poor geographer trying to explain to someone at a campus cocktail party (or even to an unsympathetic adminitrator) exactly what it is he or she studies. "Geography is Greek for 'writing about the earth.' We study the Earth.""Right, like geologists.""Well, yes, but we're interested in the whole world, not just the rocky bits. Geographers also study oceans, lakes, the water cycle...""So, it's like oceanography or hydrology.""And the atmosphere.""Meteorology, climatology...""It's broader than just physical geography. We're also interested in how humans relate to their planet.""How is that different from ecology or environmental science?""Well, it encompasses them. Aspects of them. But we also study the social and economic and cultural and geopolitical sides of--""Sociology, economics, cultural studies, poli sci.""Some geographers specialize in different world regions.""Ah, right, we have Asian and African and Latin American studies programs here. But I didn't know they were part of the geography department.""They're not."(Long pause.)"So, uh, what is it that do study then?
— Ken Jennings
My first world is humanity. My second world is humanism. And, I live in the third world being merely a human.
— Santosh Kalwar
Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socia
— Earl Warren
You can call anyone you want a traitor as long as you're the one holding the pen.
— Nihad Sirees
Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.
— Walter Savage Landor
It is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Money is a servant to politicians and the country.But, if the politicians and the country become the servant of the money, the politicians has failed.
— Oliver Kemper
All you decent, well-meaning gentlemen, let me ask you, have you any idea what sort of place the world is becoming all around you? The days when you could act out of your noble instincts are over. Except of course, you here in Europe don't yet seem to know it.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
The care of human life and happiness, and their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of a good government.
— Thomas Jefferson
Certainly, I approve of political opinions, but there are people who do not know where to stop.
— Victor Hugo
People believe what they are told.
— Jacqueline Carey
Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the goddamn road.
— Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing
The primary purposes of the political pamphlets of the early 1700s were neither to enlighten nor educate the masses, but to incite partisan conversation and spread commensurate ideas . . . Facts were not permitted to fetter the views they espoused, and the restraints of objective journalistic credibility were discarded by pamphleteers bent on promoting subjective slant to an insatiable general public for whom political dissonance was an integral part of social interaction.
— Gavin John Adams, Letters to John Law
Jim Reston: Walking through the crowds of air-kissing politicians, actors and high fliers, it was tough to tell where the politics stopped and the showbiz started. Maybe, in the end, there is no difference.
— Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon
If you distance yourself from reality and just cling to cliches about democracy find yourself a different job than analyzing politics
— Hany Ghoraba
You have two choices, [Plouffe] told Obama. You can stay in the Senate, enjoy your weekends at home, take regular vacations, and have a lovely time with your family. Or you can run for president, have your whole life poked at and pried into, almost never see your family, travel incessantly, bang your tin cup for donations like some street-corner beggar, lead a lonely, miserable life.
— John Heilemann, Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime
No system that implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended any other way but collapse
— William E. Dodd
In America, disagreement with the policies of the government does not necessitate a lack of patriotism!
— Senator Mitchell
You don't get to be the president of anything if you have bad manners.
— Daven Anderson, Vampire Syndrome
When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality.Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not.President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.
— Robert B. Reich
All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
— Clive James
Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.
— Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
There are men running governments who shouldn't be allowed to play with matches.
— Will Rogers
No one is better at not beating America than England.
— Jon Stewart
There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
Christians should never have a political party. It is a huge mistake to become married to an ideology, because the greatest enemy of the gospel is ideology. Ideology is a man-made format of how the world ought to work, and Christians instead believed in the revealing truth Scripture.
— Charles W. Colson
Sex and politics are a lot alike. You don't have to be good at them to enjoy them.
— Barry M. Goldwater
A Radical is a man with both feet firmly planted--in the air. A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A Reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest--at the command--of his head.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
If Paul Revere had been a modern day citizen, he wouldn't have ridden down Main Street. He would have tweeted.
— Alec  Ross
Let no one misunderstand our idea; we do not confound what are called 'political opinions' with that grand aspiration after progress with that sublime patriotic, democratic, and human faith, which, in our days, should be the very foundation of all generous intelligence.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
I don't like the new president who hunts muslim extremists, I like the old president who is a muslim extremist.
— Stephen Colbert
But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.
— David Frum
There’s no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who’ll help you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own church-home!
— Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
Kadafi is a zombie in a pillbox hat, that's what he is!
— Bill Maher
The King! I thought him enough of a philosopher to realize that there is no such thing as murder in politics. You know as well as I do, my dear boy, that in politics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don't kill a man, you remove an obstacle, that's all.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Great leaders passed away, politicians made their way.
— yssubramanyam
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
— Lester B. Pearson
The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.
— William McKinley
It sucks. I used to be governor of New York.
— Eliot Spitzer
In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it's at. "Pro-maternity" propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern equivalent of the double constraint: "Have babies, it's wonderful, you'll feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever," but do it in a society in freefall in which waged work is a condition of social survival but guaranteed to no one, and especially not to women. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible.
— Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theorie
It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes. If individuals do not know their own interests in many cases, they are free to turn to private experts for guidance. It is absurd to say that they will be served better by a coercive, demagogic apparatus.
— Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy
This story is the ultimate example of American’s biggest political problem. We no longer have the attention span to deal with any twenty-first century crisis. We live in an economy that is immensely complex and we are completely at the mercy of the small group of people who understand it – who incidentally often happen to be the same people who built these wildly complex economic systems. We have to trust these people to do the right thing, but we can’t, because, well, they’re scum. Which is kind of a big problem, when you think about it.
— Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it.
— Glenn Greenwald
as a lobbyist he had long ago concluded there was no difference in how Democrats and Republicans conducted the business of government. The game stayed the same: It was always about favors and friends, and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging on to power, whatever it took. .....
— Carl Hiaasen, Sick Puppy
Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.
— Glenn Greenwald
If you say you're a unifier, you expect and usually get applause. I'm a divider. Politics is division by definition, if there was no disagreement there would be no politics. The illusion of unity isn't worth having, and is anyways unattainable.
— Christopher Hitchens
Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
— Aneurin Bevan
The 'fires'n that produce thick, rarely innocent, often strategic smoke should therefore be scrutinized. they should be known and identified; and when they involve dishonesty, lies, or manipulation, they they should be ignored.
— Tariq Ramadan, What I Believe
a kind of emptiness existed in the center of my bagel
—  really it was just the hole that's in the middle of all bagels
Look at the tyranny of party-- at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty-- a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes-- and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits; and all the while, their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing thier doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible-texts and billies, and pocketing the insults nad licking the shoes of his Southern master.
— Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1
Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
— Eric Hoffer
It is politics to please and hoodwink thoseWho flatter but despise us.
— Thiruvalluvar, Kural
They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it's some kind of federal program.
— George W. Bush
It is only when he speaks German, as now, that he allows himself to lament the enslavement of the world's downtrodden classes. "We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: 'Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire.
— John le Carré
The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them..
— J.G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues....
— George Orwell, Why I Write
In the early ages of the world, according to the scripture chronology, there were no kings; the consequence of which was there were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion.
— Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Republicans don't want to 'save the world'
—  they want to save the country from those who would 'save the world.
In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.
— George Orwell, 1984
The king! I thought he was philosopher enough to allow that there was no murder in politics. In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas - no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.
— Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad
Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins.
— Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.
— Oscar Ameringer
...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.
— Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry
At a conservative estimate, there are probably a million men and women in their twenties and thirties who would happily work long hours doing what most needs to be done, if they were paid something for it.
— Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point
As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, “but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them.
— Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life
I didn`t change. The Democratic Party slid to the Left from right under me.
— Charlton Heston
He may be incensed, said Dizzy. I've never doubted the old parson's faith, but it has no place in politics. Good God, just imagine if each man allowed himself to be swayed by moral compunctions; we'd never get a damned thing accomplished in Parliament.
— Carol K. Carr, India Black
I commissioned two political experts to advise me about what I could do to oppose the re-election of President Bush.
— George Soros
In the eleven months preceding the outbreak of World War II, 211 treaties of peace were signed. Were these treaties of peace written on paper, or were they written on the hearts of men? And we must ask ourselves as we hear of treaties being written today, whether the treaties of the UN are written with the full cognizance of the fact that those who sign them are responsible before God?
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living
Israelis are a mix of North African, Levantine, and Eastern European, which inflames the politics but does amazing things for the women.
— Kenneth Cain, Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone
What is the death of a soldier even off duty of an occupying army walking in an occupied territory against the death of a little boy screaming in terror in his father's arms Where is the equivalence
— Linda Grant
The liberal state has no view on whether witchcraft is more valuable than all-in wrestling. Like a tactful publican, it has as few opinions as possible. Many liberals suspect passionate convictions are latently authoritarian. But liberalism should surely be a passionate conviction. Liberals are not necessarily lukewarm. Only the more macho leftist suspects that they have no balls. You can be ardently neutral, and fiercely indifferent.
— Terry Eagleton
The possibility of somebody emerging as a nuclear power or events happening that surprise us on the nuclear age is still a possibility. It always will be because there's an awful lot going on behind the scenes. Our intelligence just has to get better on that score. Peter Goss
— Joel C. Rosenberg, Inside the Revolution: How the Followers of Jihad, Jefferson & Jesus Are Battling to Dominate . . .
A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.
— Robert Byrne
Republicans have succeeded with a social agenda that gets people to vote against their own interests while the Democrats are so elitist that they can't tap into the anger that's real.
— Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture
People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.
— Paul Graham
As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.
— Leon Trotsky
Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the 'official truth'. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as 'functionaires', functionaries, not journalists. Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words 'impartiality' and 'objectivity' is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over... [they] now mean the establishment point of view... Journalists don't sit down and think, 'I'm now going to speak for the establishment.' Of course not. But they internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.
— John Pilger
Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
— Thomas Jefferson
Ivanov- "Up to now , all revolutions have been made by moralizing diletantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent...""Yes," said Rubashov. "So consequent, that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Artic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indo-China. ...
— Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
The question of socialism or communism or capitalism or between the left and right – I think the important question is between the industrial society and the earth-based society. And I say that because I believe that capitalism and communism are really much more about how the wealth is distributed, if it trickles down or is appropriated at the beginning to those who have worked for it. But, you know, someone has to question where the wealth came from. What right does society have to the wealth? What is the relationship between that society and the land from which it got its wealth? Those are the questions that should be asked.
— Winona LaDuke
At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can't take anything, you won't get anything, and if you can't hold anything, you won't keep anything. And you can't take anything without organization.
— A. Philip Randolph
Condemnation feels good and it is now a staple of religion, politics, and the media (both left and right), but it changes nothing. Compassion, on the other hand, changes everything. (p. 121)
— Robin R. Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus
But his political sense kept up a persistent itch that said: A, Given ignorance in the mix, stupidity was at least as common in politics as astute maneuvering; B, Crisis always drew insects; and, C, Inevitably the party trying to resolve a matter had to contend with the party most willing to exploit it.
— C.J. Cherryh, Invader
Inequality of wealth and incomes is an essential feature of the market economy. It is the implement that makes the consumers supreme in giving them the power to force all those engaged in production to comply with their orders. It forces all those engaged in production to the utmost exertion in the service of the consumers. It makes competition work. He who best serves the consumers profits most and accumulatesriches.
— Ludwig von Mises, Economic Freedom and Interventionism
In politics, nothing is contemptible.
— Benjamin Disraeli
The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events—over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone’s.
— Jill Lepore
The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.
— Theodore H. White
If any era should be aware of the temptations to rewrite history, it is our own.
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture
Therefore it is not arrogance or narrow-mindedness that leads the economist to discuss these things from the standpoint of economics. No one, who is not able to form an independent opinion about the admittedly difficult and highly technical problem of calculation in the socialist economy, should take sides in the question of socialism versus capitalism. No one should speak about interventionism who has not examined the economic consequences of interventionism. An end should be put to the common practice of discussing these problems from the standpoint of the prevailing errors, fallacies, and prejudices. It might be more entertaining to avoid the real issues and merely to use popular catchwords and emotional slogans. But politics is a serious matter. Those who do not want to think its problems through to the end should keep away from it.
— Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism: An Economic Analysis
One of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough.
— Charlie Brooker
What was achieved under Nazi-fascism through bloody terror against the organized workers’ movement and the people is to be achieved again today in West Europe through the “information society
— Red Army Faction
What counted was not the facts but the fears.
— Max Lerner
If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed
— Winston S. Churchill
Well, let's see. There's—of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be others. But, um.
— Sarah Palin
Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees.
— Terry Eagleton
Mary wasn't brilliant.She was a good woman who let her emotions guide her politics. She just couldn't help being for anybody who was agin something.
— Murray Morgan
The great cause of the new Republican intake is the reduction of the deficit but to anyone seeking evidence of sincere attempts at deficit-reduction the evidence is baffling. The Republicans showed before Christmas that they would seek to reduce the deficit but not when it came to a matter of the tax breaks that had aggravated the deficit in the first place.Now there's a date set for the abolition of Barack Obama's healthcare plan, parts of which only came into operation at the start of this month. The Republicans are out to destroy the plan. Or, more precisely, to pretend to destroy the plan in the name of making good on election pledges. The measure won't get past the Senate.But suppose it did get past the Senate, what effect would this have on the deficit? The answer is it would aggravate the deficit. Somehow, somewhere, there's an override mechanism that makes destroying Obamacare more important than destroying the deficit. If only one could figure out how it works.
— James Fenton
That is the corrosive paradox of gender feminism's misandrist stance: no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men.
— Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women
It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
The capitalist empires, with their affirmations of sacrifice for the free world, of defence of private enterprise, of safeguarding order from subversion and chaos, are in fact defending their political prestige and the economic interests arising from it; they are indeed at the service of economic power and the international trusts. The socialist empires for their part are hard and intransigent, they do not allow pluralism, they impose dialectical materialism, demand blind obedience to the party, set up a regime of total and permanent insecurity and fear, just like the fascist dictatorships of the extreme right.
— Hélder Câmara
[A] resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them.
— Perry Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas
Without exception all political parties promise their supporters a higher real income. There is no difference in this respect between nationalists and internationalists and between the supporters of a market economy and the advocates of either socialism or interventionism. If a party asks its supporters to make sacrifices for its cause, it always explains these sacrifices as the necessary temporary means for the attainment of the ultimate goal, the improvement of the material well-being of its members. Each party considers it as an insidious plot against its prestige and its survival if somebody ventures to question the capacity of its projects to make the group members more prosperous. Each party regards with a deadly hatred the economists embarking upon such a critique. 
— Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics