Politics Quotes - Page 16

In response to my question about how we might rein in the empire, he said, "That's why I'm meeting with you. Only you in the United States can change it. Your government created this problem and your people must solve it. You've got to insist that Washington honor its commitment to democracy, even when deomcratically elected leaders nationalize your corrupting corporations. You must take control of your corporations and your government. The people of the United States have a great deal of power. You need to come to grips with this. There's no alternative. We in Brazil have our hands tied. So do the Venezeulans. And the Nigerians. It's up to you.

John Perkins

...they say if you don't vote, you get the government you deserve, and if you do, you never get the results you expected.

E.A. Bucchianeri

In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we're back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.

David Axelrod

Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one's heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one's naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions.

Joseph Epstein

If I went on a killing spree that left thousands of people dead, I'd be branded as the worst kind of criminal. So why it is okay for the government to do exactly that?

Michelle Templet

Securing, not prohibiting, the orderly transfer of wealth from A to B, based on wealth differentials, is the raison d'être of the [New Deal programs]. The contrast between the modern progressive and classical liberal agendas could not be more explicit.

Richard A. Epstein

While the Christian faith clearly teaches that believers are to be involved as good citizens in the state, nevertheless, it is obvious why so many secularists are addicted to politics because political power is a surrogate for a Higher Power.

J.P. Moreland

Moralistic culture views government as a positive force, one that values the individual but functions to the benefit of the general public. Discussion of public issues and voting are not only rights but also opportunities to better the individual and society alike. Furthermore, politicians should not profit from their public service.

William Earl Maxwell

The U.S. government needs to learn from successful private businesses that run an effective and efficient operation in serving their customers and outwitting their competitors.

Newton Lee

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

P.J. O'Rourke

Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it's not the result of venal bureaucrats. (1994) p. 99

Philip K. Howard

Uniformity in the common law, consisting of broad principles like the "reasonable person" standard, generally permits adjustment for the circumstances. This type of uniform principle is almost synonymous with fairness. Uniform application of a detailed rule, on the other hand, will almost always favor one group over another. p. 34

Philip K. Howard

The sense that just about anything goes with the collection of public revenues and the making of public expenditure has contributed mightily to the current malaise.

Richard A. Epstein

The pillars of classical liberalism call for flat taxes, with revenues put to limited uses; strong property rights; and free markets.

Richard A. Epstein

For an entire wing of the G.O.P., a dysfunctional government, whose only visible activity is mismanaging crises, is not an embarrassment but the vindication of a worldview.

Amy Davidson

The desire to avoid short-term hardships leads to major dislocations in [housing] markets.

Richard A. Epstein

That effort to undermine competitive markets is no better in the market for labor than it is for goods and services.

Richard A. Epstein

This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)

Victor Davis Hanson

For forms of Government let fools contest. Whate'er is best administered is best.

Alexander Pope

By making the government a combination of elected officials and citizen-backed initiatives and referenda, there can truly be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Victoria Stoklasa

The challenge has always been that "good people" don't know how to win elections

Fela Durotoye

Have you ever found yourself saying, "There ought to be a law against this," or, "Somebody should do something"? Well, here’s the good news - you can be the one to do something. You can be the one to make the law.

Victoria Stoklasa MA

If you have the right to influence the laws that are made in your community, why not take the opportunity to do something good?

Victoria Stoklasa

Harming one’s unalienable rights in order to serve justice is injustice.

J.S.B. Morse

Because widespread participation is so central to popular sovereignty, we can say that the less political participation there is in a society, the weaker the democracy.

Edward S. Greenberg

In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore Senior had written: "The 'Machine politicians' have shown their colors... I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

Edmund Morris

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

G.K. Chesterton

A less well known impact of immigrant populations is the increase that destination states gain in Congress where apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives is calculated on the basis of a state's entire adult population regardless of legal status. And, because each state's electoral college vote is the sum of the number of its representatives in the House and its two senators, high immigration states play a larger role in presidential elections than they might if only adult citizens and legal aliens were counted in population surveys.

Edward S. Greenberg

For the most part, the evidence shows that individual Americans do not care a great deal about politics and are rather poorly informed, unstable in their views, and not much interested in participating in the political process. These findings have led some observers to assert that citizens are ill-equipped for the responsibility of self-governance and that public opinion (the will of the majority) should not be the ultimate determinant of what government does.

Edward S. Greenberg

Making universal prosperity a right is the surest way to universal poverty.

J.S.B. Morse

No one can take away your Natural Rights, but they can do great damage making you think they can.

J.S.B. Morse

If you require force to promote your ideal, there is something wrong with your ideal.

J.S.B. Morse

I don't believe in the Constitution because I'm American, I'm American because I believe in the Constitution.

J.S.B. Morse

This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us.

Nick Harkaway

Other nations merely change governments as a lady changes dancing partners: Canada contrives to fall in a dead faint every time the music stops.

Gordon Donaldson

Almost all the prosperity of a public society and civil community does, under God, depend on their rulers. They are like the main springs or wheels in a machine that keep every part in their due motion, and are in the body politic, as in the vitals in the body natural, and as the pillars and the foundation in a building.

Jonathan Edwards

It's illegal to forcefully take money from people unless you're the government. It's illegal to take someone's liberty, unless you're the government. It's illegal to kill someone, unless you're the government. Private organizations can do everything that government can do except for legally break the law.

J.S.B. Morse

Supposedly, the government is in the process of saving us from terrorists. No one has quite figured out who is going to save us from the government. It seems it will have to be us. Part of what we built works great. Part of what we built badly needs fixing. It is delusional to think that a few politicians can fix what took several hundred million people to build—and run down.

Doug "Ten" Rose

Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice. It may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.[Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97, 1968.]

Abe Fortas

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H.L. Mencken

The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man. . . . [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.(A plaque with this quotation, with the first phrase omitted, is in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.)

Thomas Jefferson

I must admit that I feel that the best form of government is benevolent despotism.

Jeff Grubb

As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.

Thomas Sowell

Don't let a corrupt Media and Criminal Government continue to Brainwash You. THINK FOR YOURSELVES JAMAICANS WHILE YOU STILL CAN!

Alecia Thompson

No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

Mark Twain

When individuals combine in a joint effort to realize ends the have in common, the organizations, like the state, that they form for this purpose are given their own system of ends and their own means. But any organization thus formed remains one "person" among other, in the case of the state much more powerful than any of the others, it is true, yet still with its separate and limited sphere in which alone its ends are supreme.

Friedrich A. Hayek

A government that kills its own citizens is like a parent that kills their own kids aka filicide or like a mother that kills her unborn by abortion .

Youns Hussein

Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here's one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population.

Jeffrey Tucker

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.

P.J. O'Rourke

Statism is an unnatural disaster.

Stefan Molyneux

[I]t kind of terrified me to imagine myself spending the rest of my life tinkering on the margins of the small arguments.

Lawrence Lessig

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. &It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of protecting themselves by arms and be so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for rebellion.

Aristotle

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul....I was wrong to follow the meanness of Conservatism. I should have been trying to help people instead of taking advantage of them. I don't hate anyone anymore. For the first time in my life I don't hate somebody. I have nothing but good feelings toward people. I've found Jesus Christ – It's that simple. He's made a difference. (Reagan's campaign manager "death-bed confession" in Feb. 1991 article for Life Magazine )

Lee Atwater

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

Aristotle

In his 1907 retirement address, Joseph Pulitzer urged his successors to always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

Joseph Pulitzer

No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.

Ludwig von Mises

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

Leonard Bernstein

Are there good governments and bad governments? No, there are only bad governments and worse governments.

Charles Bukowski

That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone. (to Horatio Gates, 1798)

Thomas Jefferson

Previous 1 … 14 15 16 17 18 … 71 Next

Politics Quotes - Page 16

Related Topics