Great Political Quotes

Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation, but they pass far above and over the heads of the other half.

English experience indicates that when the two great political parties agree about something it is generally wrong.

The prime minister of Israel is welcome to speak in the United States, obviously. But we don't want to see this turned into some great political football

Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side

I continue to believe when I said in Hanover, that the E.U. remains one of the world's great political and economic achievements, and that those achievements should not be taken for granted.

It is the intense spirituality of India, and not any great political structure or social organisation that it has developed, that has enabled it to resist the ravages of time and the accidents of history.

We're in a political depression - a great political depression

Ideologies - isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurence by deducing it from a single premise - are a very recent phenomenon ... Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of the ideologies discovered.

The human being is an unequal creature. That is a fact. And we start off with the proposition. All the great religions, all the great movements, all the great political ideology, say let us make the human being as equal as possible. In fact, he is not equal, never will be.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

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.

I have one great political idea... That idea is an old one. It is widely and generally assented to; nevertheless, it is very generally trampled upon and disregarded. The best expression of it, I have found in the Bible. It is in substance, "Righteousness exalteth a nation - sin is a reproach to any people." This constitutes my politics, the negative and positive of my politics, and the whole of my politics... I feel it my duty to do all in my power to infuse this idea into the public mind, that it may speedily be recognized and practiced upon by our people.

I mean, in the campaign of '24 and in '28 and '32, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt insists that women have equal floor space. And this is a great victory over time. Then she wants women represented in equal numbers as men. And she wants the women to name the delegates. And the men want to name the delegates. Well, Eleanor is absolutely furious. And because they don't want her to walk away in 1924, she wins. And this is a great political victory. She has floor space equal to the men, and she has the right to name the women.

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!

All the great political music was made at the height of political confrontations.

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

That great political idea, sanctifying freedom and consecrating it to God, teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own and to defend them for the love of justice and charity more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years.

Now the good of political life is a great political good. It is not a secular good specified by a comprehensive doctrine like those of Kant or Mill. You could characterize this political good as the good of free and equal citizens recognizing the duty of civility to one another: the duty to give citizens public reasons for one's political actions.

The two great political parties of the nation have existed for the purpose, each in accordance with its own principles, of undertaking to serve the interests of the whole nation. Their members of the Congress are chosen with that great end in view.

History shows us that the people who end up changing the world - the great political, social, scientific, technological, artistic, even sports revolutionaries - are always nuts, until they are right, and then they are geniuses.

I guess I just don't have the killer instinct that I think makes a great political cartoonist.

With a novelist's sense of drama and a historian's understanding of the social forces that shape our lives, Tom Gjelten has captured vividly -- through the chronicle of a powerful family's fortunes -- one of the great political dramas of our time.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition.

"War," says Machiavelli, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

If I wrote at all, I must throw myself headlong into the great political maelstrom, and would of course be swallowed up like a fishing-boat in the great Norway horror which decorated our school geographies; for no woman had ever done such a thing, and I could never again hold up my head under the burden of shame and disgrace which would be heaped upon me. But what matter? I had no children to dishonor; all save one who had ever loved me were dead, and she no longer needed me, and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one could be better spared than I.

If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

I can remember certain Manchester United defeats the way most people remember family bereavements or great political events. The four-nil drubbing by Barcelona, the failure to score against West Ham, the New Year's Day calamity at home to Spurs, the mauling by Middlesborough.

I would say that my great political awakening was really born on Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the "Neither Victims nor Executioners" essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself. I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me.

Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France, I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.

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

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

Elections, especially of representatives and counselors, should be annual, there not being in the whole circle of the sciences a maxim more infallible than this, "where annual elections end, there slavery begins." These great men ... should be (chosen) once a year-Like bubbles on the sea of matter bourne, they rise, they break, and to the sea return. This will teach them the great political virtues of humility, patience, and moderation, without which every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.

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

The great political questions are in their final analysis great moral questions.

Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics andtrade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Al Gore seems to have found a great political ploy: Picking up whatever issue he is most vulnerable on and championing the cause. Perhaps he will start to champion perjury statutes and obstruction of justice.

Politicians had always viewed environmental issues as narrow things of no great political consequence. Sort of NIMBY issues. A big part of the reason was that the groups that cared about wilderness didn't talk with the groups that were trying to stop freeways from cutting through inner cities, and neither of them talked to the folks who wanted to stop the military from dumping Agent Orange on Vietnam.

There was great political uncertainty in South Asia at the time of the Buddha. The older small tribal societies were cracking up and gave way to bigger states. There was much more trade and travel going on than before. To people in the cities the experience of living in a small place where you knew everyone and governed your affairs by consensual democracy had been lost.

Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes.

Of the two great political parties which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country, the candid and the just will now admit that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration of this Government, and that both have required a liberal indulgence for a portion of human infirmity and error.

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 against democracy.

The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that “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.