Politics Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Politics

"Democratic politicians want to solve the crisis of poor education by taking more of your money and using it to reduce classroom sizes in the government schools. Republican politicians want to solve the crisis by taking more of your money to provide vouchers to a handful of the poorest students in each area, paying for a part of the tuition expense at private schools. But before long this 'reform' would make those private schools indistinguishable from the government schools ... Vouchers are an excellent way for the government to increase control over private schools."

Harry Browne

"Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death."

Neil Postman

"Country is run by... financial powers & corporate interests [who] send their lawyers to Congress to make laws so that they don't have to pay taxes"

Gore Vidal

"It is the political task of the social scientist — as of any liberal educator — continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals. It is his task to display in his work — and, as an educator, in his life as well — this kind of sociological imagination. And it is his purpose to cultivate such habits of mind among the men and women who are publicly exposed to him. To secure these ends is to secure reason and individuality, and to make these the predominant values of a democratic society."

Charles Wright Mills

"The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend on it."

Jimmy Carter

"Politics is made up of two words: "Poli," which is Greek for "many," and "tics," which are bloodsucking insects."

Gore Vidal

"The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution."

Ludwig von Mises

"Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all"

Thomas Kuhn

"If we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals...We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities."

Erich Fromm

"If voting could actually change anything, it would be illegal."

Noam Chomsky

"'Fair' is one of the most dangerous concepts in politics. Since no two people are likely to agree on what is 'fair,' this means that there must be some third party with power - the government - to impose its will. The road to despotism is paved with 'fairness'."

Thomas Sowell

"There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else."

Thomas Sowell

"Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others - regardless of what the facts may be."

Thomas Sowell

"There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse."

Thomas Sowell

"Politicians are not born; they are excreted."

Cicero

"The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority."

Walter Lippmann

"Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world."

Emma Goldman

"Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval, and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public’s consent to a program or goal."

Edward Bernays