Politics Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Politics

"If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools."

Platon

"Every time government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves."

Benjamin Constant

"Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings."

Hannah Arendt

"We the people, elect leaders not to rule but to serve"

Eisenhower

"The decisive means for politics is violence."

Max Weber

"Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state."

Max Weber

"Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.""

Gore Vidal

"The people have the power. All we have to do is awaken the power in the people."

John Lennon

"If politicians get money to spend and don't have to be responsible for taxation, then of course that will bias their attitude toward more spending as opposed to cutting back on spending."

James M. Buchanan

"No one can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions, for it is over these institutional means of power that the truly powerful are, in the first instance, truly powerful . . ."

Charles Wright Mills

"Funded by the government just means funded by the people. Government, by the way, has no money. It only takes money from the people. Sometimes people forget that that's really what occurs."

Elon Musk

"All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence."

Charles Wright Mills

"By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them."

Charles Wright Mills

"Only those understand politics who have the possibility at any given time to realize their ideas of the policies to be made, that is, those who are in power."

Heinrich Böll

"It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people."

Gore Vidal

"Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon."

Gore Vidal

"It doesn't actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they've had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run."

Gore Vidal

"Anarchism is surprisingly effective in solving actual problems largely because anarchists have thought a lot about solving actual problems on a micro level in ways that other political ideologies don't really feel they have to until after they seize state power."

David Graeber