Political Quotes, Quotes about Politics

In America, we have a system in which multi-billionaire elitists select millionaire candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties. The people are then free to select which candidates they think will screw them the least. We call this Democracy. -Gary Amirault
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"Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage": Ambrose Bierce
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"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle": Edmund Burke
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“Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. “We have a single system,” he wrote, and “in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.” Gore Vidal - The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
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“If a baseball player slides into home plate and, right before the umpire rules if he is safe or out, the player says to the umpire, ‘Here is $1,000.’ What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. If a lawyer was arguing a case before a judge and said, ‘Your honor before you decide on the guilt or innocence of my client, here is $1,000.’ What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. But if an industry lobbyist walks into the office of a key legislator and hands her or him a check for $1,000, we call that a campaign contribution. We should call it a bribe.” Janice Fine - Dollars and Sense magazine
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“Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” Ambrose Bierce
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Political Quotes
Characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner. Aristophanes 456-386 B.C. Greek Dramatist
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Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
- Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998), Historian and author
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"Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory." - John Kenneth Galbraith (1908- ) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
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"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."--William Edgar Borah
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“All our political forms are exhausted and practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary and electoral system and our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable. Nothing is left. And this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, and omnipresent. Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, and at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority, and social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state.” - Jacques Ellul
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"For in every city these two opposite parties [people vs aristocracy] are to be found, arising from the desire of the populace to avoid oppression of the great, and the desire of the great to command and oppress the people....For when the nobility see that they are unable to resist the people, they unite in exalting one of their number and creating him prince, so as to be able to carry out their own designs under the shadow of his authority." Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. IX
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“An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought." - Simon Cameron (Lincoln's Secretary of War)
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"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it." U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, Aug. 12, 1945
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"To change masters is not to be free." -- Jose Marti y Perez (1853-1895)
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"Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for their own side. Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers." - R. Buckminster Fuller

"Each candidate behaved well in the hope of being judged worthy of election. However, this system was disastrous when the city had become corrupt. For then it was not the most virtuous but the most powerful who stood for election, and the weak, even if virtuous, were too frightened to run for office." Fyrefly1985 Niccolo Machiavelli

"Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody." Franklin Pierce Adams
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"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." John Quincy Adams
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Politics is a means of preventing people from taking part in what properly concerns them." Paul Valery (1871-1945)
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"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." -- Tacitus, Roman senator and historian (A.D. c.56-c.115)
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"The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be. The more laws are promulgated, the more thieves and bandits there will be." -- Lao-tzu, The Tao Te Ching
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"Overload the police with victimless crimes and other minutiae and eventually only creeps and bullies remain cops." -- Rick Gaber
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"The State is the coldest of all cold monsters, and coldly it tells lies, and this lie drones on from its mouth: 'I, the State, am the people'." -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra, 1883
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"Government, when it is examined, turns out to be nothing more nor less than a group of fallible men with the political force to act as though they were infallible." -- Robert LeFevre, in his essay, Aggression is Wrong
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"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." -- Pericles, 430 B.C.
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"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." -- Demosthenes: Philippic 2, sect. 24
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"It is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power." -- John Adams, 1788
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"What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else." -- Tom Clancy on Kudlow and Cramer 9/2/03
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"It's important to realize that whenever you give power to politicians or bureaucrats, it will be used for what they want, not for what you want."-- Harry Browne
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"If you go to the city of Washington, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of congress, and mis-representatives of the masses claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad that I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks." Eugene V. Debs - Socialist, Activist, Presidential Candidate, (1855-1926)
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"The people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberties. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy . . . Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone." --Thomas Jefferson
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"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts -- not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution." Abraham Lincoln
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"While vast sums of money are being siphoned off into hidden [military] coffers, Americas schools, hospitals and public services are facing cutbacks and closures." - Representative Henry Waxman
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"The problem, of course, lies with the realities concealed from us. This has always been the case. While the American public has slowly grappled with ongoing injustices visible within our own borders, it has long failed to discover and correct our government's abuses abroad. In the end, however, this is our government, and torture is being utilized in our names and supported by our tax dollars. We are responsible.": Jennifer Harbury: Writer, Lawyer, Human Rights Activist
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During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism. Howard Thurman
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Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthralment to those in power: Leo Toystoy - Demanding the Impossible: a History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall (fontana press 1992) p374
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“We should take care, in inculcating patriotism into our boys and girls, that is a patriotism above the narrow sentiment which usually stops at one's country, and thus inspires jealousy and enmity in dealing with others... Our patriotism should be of the wider, nobler kind which recognises justice and reasonableness in the claims of others and which lead our country into comradeship with...the other nations of the world. The first step to this end is to develop peace and goodwill within our borders, by training our youth of both sexes to its practice as their habit of life, so that the jealousies of town against town, class against class and sect against sect no longer exist; and then to extend this good feeling beyond our frontiers towards our neighbours.” Lord Baden-Powell
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He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man... Samuel Adams
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"Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces."  Hannah Arendt
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"The value of love will always be stronger than the value of hate. Any nation or group of nations which employs hatred eventually is torn to pieces by hatred..."  Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Why is it that “compassionate” conservative, gun toting, patriotic, politically right wing Christians usually behave and speak more like Jewish Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers and scribes than Jesus Christ? Gary Amirault
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"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -  H. L. Mencken
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"Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently and all for the same reason." - José Maria de Eça de Queiroz
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"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." - Alice Walker
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"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.": P. J. O'Rourke - (1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
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"In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy." - Matt Taibbi
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"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
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"A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country." - Tex Guinan
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"The problem with political jokes is they get elected." - Henry Cate, VII
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"Politicians are in bed with corporate crooks. They don't give a damn about life, liberty, equity, justice, and human need. Policies they support show it. Growing inequality is institutionalized. America's heading for oblivion. People needs are ignored. Depression conditions threaten to become catastrophic. Policymakers able to act don't notice or care. Self-interest defines them. They infest Washington like a metastasizing cancer." - Stephen Lendman
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Wolves in Politicians' Clothing
"If once [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions." -- Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787