Quotes by Politicians - Page 74

from Bill Clinton speech- People are more impressed by the power of our example rather than the example of our power...
Bill Clinton
It is not power that corrupts but fear.
Aung San Suu Kyi
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Winston S. Churchill
Some leaders are born women.
Geraldine Ferraro
I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
Charles de Gaulle
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Mr. Speaker, I once again find myself compelled to vote against the annual budget resolution for a very simple reason: it makes government bigger.
Ron Paul
The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.
Samuel Adams
I've never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a 'fat cat' and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a 'public-spirited philanthropist'.
Ronald Reagan
No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.
Samuel Adams
While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice our local destination. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world.
John Adams
A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.
Winston S. Churchill
There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.
John Adams
We need to understand the more government spends, the more freedom is lost...Instead of simply debating spending levels, we ought to be debating whether the departments, agencies, and programs funded by the budget should exist at all.
Ron Paul
I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
James Madison
There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America.
Barack Obama
Consensus: “The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?
Margaret Thatcher
How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
Ronald Reagan
The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.
Patrick Henry
Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
One thing is clear: The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.
Ron Paul
When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty'.
Theodore Roosevelt
If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.
Theodore Roosevelt
As government expands, liberty contracts.
Ronald Reagan
How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?
Charles de Gaulle
After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.
Ann Richards
If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.
John F Kennedy
Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.
Barack Obama
(When told that he is a drunk) My dear, you are ugly; but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
Sir Winston Churchill
The men worked hard and faithfully. As a rule, in spite of the number of rough characters among them, they behaved very well. One night a few of them went on a spree, and proceeded "to paint San Antonio red." One was captured by the city authorities, and we had to leave him behind us in jail. The others we dealt with ourselves, in a way that prevented a repetition of the occurrence.
Theodore Roosevelt
Sir Hamish Graham has many of the qualities & most of the failings that result from being born to a middle-class Scottish family. He was well educated, hard working & honest, while at the same time being narrow-minded, uncompromising & proud.
Jeffrey Archer
When will the Home Office realize that when judges retire, not only are they sent home for the rest of their lives, but the only people they have left to judge are their innocent wives.''So what are you recommending?'asked Alex as they walked into the drawing room.'That judges should be shot on their seventieth birthday, and their wives granted a royal pardon and given their pensions by a grateful nation.''I may have come up with a more acceptable solution,' suggested Alex.'Like what? Making it legal to assist judges' wives to commit suicide?''Something a little less drastic,' said Alex.
Jeffrey Archer
Death by creaming
Yvonne miller
In 1969 I published a small book on Humility. It was a pioneering work which has not, to my knowledge, been superceded.
Frank Pakenham
I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.
Dan Quayle
Here is a man whose life and actions the world has already condemned - yet whose enormous fortune...has already brought him acquittal!
Marcus Tullius Cicero
If politics were a musical, it would be "Promises, Promises".
Ronald Reagan
War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can.
Winston S. Churchill
Being born in a stable does not make one a horse.
Arthur Wellesley
I know the human being and fish can co-exist peacefully.
George W. Bush
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Winston S. Churchill
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Irina Dunn
Why should you desire to compel others; why should you seek to have power— that evil, bitter, mocking thing, which has been from of old, as it is today, the sorrow and curse of the world—over your fellow-men and fellow-women? Why should you desire to take from any man or woman their own will and intelligence, their free choice, their own self-guidance, their inalienable rights over themselves; why should you desire to make of them mere tools and instruments for your own advantage and interest; why should you desire to compel them to serve and follow your opinions instead of their own; why should you deny in them the soul—that suffers so deeply from all constraint—and treat them as a sheet of blank paper upon which you may write your own will and desires, of whatever kind they may happen to be? Who gave you the right, from where do you pretend to have received it, to degrade other men and women from their own true rank as human beings, taking from them their will, their conscience, and intelligence—in a word, all the best and highest part of their nature—turning them into mere empty worthless shells, mere shadows of the true man and women, mere counters in the game you are mad enough to play, and just because you are more numerous or stronger than they, to treat them as if they belonged not to themselves, but to you? Can you believe that good will ever come by morally and spiritually degrading your fellow-men? What happy and safe and permanent form of society can you hope to build on this pitiful plan of subjecting others, or being yourselves subjected by them?
Auberon Herbert
I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one's birth, whether one acknowledges it or not...His life is circumscribed by racist laws and regulations that cripple his growth, dim his potential, and stunt his life...I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.
Nelson Mandela
Liberty means refusing to allow some men to use the state to compel other men to serve their interests or opinion.
Auberon Herbert
The imagination serves us only when the mind is absolutely free of any prejudice. A single prejudice suffices to cool off the imagination. This whimsical part of the mind is so unbridled as to be uncontrollable. Its greatest triumphs, its most eminent delights consist in smashing all the restraints that oppose it. Imagination is the enemy of all norms, the idolater of all disorder and of all that bears the color of crime.
Marquis de Sade
...Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender. Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." "There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this—this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits—not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty." You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness...
Ronald Reagan
The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she is destined to become the safe and venerable asylum of virtue, of honesty, of tolerance, and quality and of peaceful liberty.
Marquis De Lafayette
We wanted to be free and owe this freedom to nobody.
Jan Stanisław Jankowski
Freedom is being allowed to think your own thoughts and live your own life.
John F Kennedy
For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances freedom to others. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I rest only for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.
Nelson Mandela
Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgement, not till he’s shown his colors, run the people, making laws. Experience, there’s the test.
Nelson Mandela
An idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army or any government
Ron Paul
For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga- a belief that we're all connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me- even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer- even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief- I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper- that makes this country work.
Barack Obama
I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion... for liberalism is not so much a party creed as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.
John F Kennedy
In order to justify your nonsense, you continue to fight battles won long ago. You rage against threats that exist only in your mind....You focus on the colour of schoolbags, sexist pronouns, pink toys in Kinder Surprises and the sharing of dish-washing duties in relationships. All the while completely ignoring what it is that really threatens the freedom of women....Your aversion towards the patriarchy, manifested in the form of straight white males, has led you you to become bedfellows of all the other minorities who share that aversion.
Marion Le Pen
You can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea. You can kill a man, but not an idea.
Benazir Bhutto
We seek no treasure, we seek no territorial gains, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his rights to worship his god, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble labourer returned from his work when the day is don, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest.
Winston S. Churchill