Politics Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Politics

"Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils."

George Orwell

"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

"Politics: “Poli” a Latin word meaning “many” and “tics” meaning “bloodsucking creatures”."

Myron Coureval Fagan

"An Honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid ... because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation."

Bertrand Russell

"Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street."

Joseph Goebbels

"If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power."

Eisenhower

"Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it."

Laurence J. Peter

"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

"We have two distinct types of political organization to take into account; and clearly, too, when their origins are considered, it is impossible to make out that the one is a mere perversion of the other. Therefore when we include both types under a general term like government, we get into logical difficulties; difficulties of which most writers on the subject have been more or less vaguely aware, but which, until within the last half-century, none of them has tried to resolve."

Albert Jay Nock

"If the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds … its policies would most definitely reflect the ‘legitimate concerns’ of children to have ‘adequate’ and ‘equal’ access to ‘free’ french fries, lemonade and videos."

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"Public officials are permitted to finance or subsidize their own activities through taxes. That is, they are permitted to engage in and live off, what in private dealings between private law subjects is prohibited and considered 'theft' and 'stolen loot.'"

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service."

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"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