The 40 Best Quotes About Politics

Are YOU interested in politics? Then you need to read these.

1) "A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued, but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader." -- Samuel Adams

2) "The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins - that is, until the late evening newscast, when suddenly we are plunged into the world as it is. Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is a rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest. Two examples would be the priest who wants to be a bishop and bootlicks and politicks his way up, justifying it with the rationale, 'After I get to be bishop I'll use my office for Christian reformation,' or the businessman who reasons, 'First I'll make my million and after that, I'll go for the real things in life,' Unfortunately one changes in many ways on the road to the bishopric or the first million, and then one says, 'I'll wait until I'm a cardinal and then I can be more effective,' or 'I can do a lot more after I get two million' - and so it goes. In this world, laws are written for the lofty aim of 'the common good' and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed." -- Saul Alinsky

3) "Democracy is a slow process of stumbling to the right decision instead of going straight forward to the wrong one." -- Anonymous

4) "The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

5) "Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy." -- Louis Brandeis

6) "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. … Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." -- Edmund Burke

7) "Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -- Winston Churchill

8) "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." -- Gerald R. Ford

9) "Indeed, as libertarians are fond of pointing out, pretty much all laws come with the implicit threat of violence. Don’t believe me? Refuse to obey even the most picayune law and eventually a man in uniform with a gun on his hip is going to come talk to you about it." -- Jonah Goldberg

10) "Complexity is a subsidy. The more complex government makes society, the more it rewards those with the resources to deal with that complexity, and the more it punishes those who do not." -- Jonah Goldberg

11) "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." -- Robert Heinlein

12) "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer

13) "Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually, the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil… Common hatred unites the most heterogeneous elements. To share a common hatred, with an enemy even, is to infect him with a feeling of kinship, and thus sap his powers of resistance… Again, like an idea deity, the ideal devil is omnipotent and omnipresent." -- Eric Hoffer

14) "The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." -- Robert M. Hutchins

15) "Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power." -- Aldous Huxley

16) "That government is best which governs the least because its people discipline themselves." -- Thomas Jefferson

17) "Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread." -- Thomas Jefferson

18) "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth - some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say." -- Michael Kinsley

19) "To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil." -- Charles Krauthammer

20) "And many writers have imagined for themselves republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for there is such a gap between how one lives and how one ought to live that anyone who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation: for a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good." -- Niccolo Machiavelli

21) "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

22) "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." -- James Madison

23) "The people made the Constitution, and the people can unmake it. It is the creature of their own will, and lives only by their own will." -- John Marshall

24) "The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane." -- Megan McCardle

25) "All politics is local." -- Tip O'Neill

26) "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." -- P.J. O'Rourke

27) "With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to healthcare, you have to realize what that implies. It's not an abstraction. I'm a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you're going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses." -- Rand Paul

28) "The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort." -- Plato

29) "He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine

30) "America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance - and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way." -- Ayn Rand

31) "I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts." -- Ronald Reagan

32) "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." -- Ronald Reagan

33) "In short, killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, so long as the goose does not die before the next election and no one traces the politicians’ fingerprints on the murder weapon." -- Thomas Sowell

34) "No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems—of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind." -- Thomas Sowell

35) "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog." -- Attributed to Harry Truman

36) "Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." -- Harry Truman

37) "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage." -- Alexander Fraser Tytler

38) "However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." -- George Washington

39) "How many times have we heard 'free tuition,' 'free healthcare,' and free you-name-it? If a particular good or service is truly free, we can have as much of it as we want without the sacrifice of other goods or services. Take a 'free' library; is it really free? The answer is no. Had the library not been built, that $50 million could have purchased something else. That something else sacrificed is the cost of the library. While users of the library might pay a zero price, zero price and free are not one and the same. So when politicians talk about providing something free, ask them to identify the beneficent Santa Claus or tooth fairy." -- Walter Williams

40) "Compromise is very difficult in a political environment in which a deal is not a deal. Whether the question is trading robust immigration enforcement for an amnesty benefiting those illegals already present in the country or trading tax increases for spending cuts according to some agreed-upon ratio, the main obstacle is not ideology or partisan self-interest, but the belief - a well-justified belief - that cutting a long-term deal is pointless, because such deals will not stand." -- Kevin Williamson

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