Politics Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Politics

"What the public does is not to express its opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can be the direct expression of the will of the people. We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilizations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally."

Walter Lippmann

"There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics."

Emma Goldman

"The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue."

Emma Goldman

"It has long been obvious in the Western tribal countries of democracy that the promises inherent in this concept will probably remain unfulfilled: Politics is losing ground dramatically to the power of the markets; supposedly democratic systems are firmly in the hands of powerfully organized interests and have less and less to do with popular sovereignty - if there ever was any. Social inequality and the disenfranchisement and reification of citizens as mere administrative objects or human resources are advancing inexorably - though every step of disenfranchisement is communicated as emancipatory gain."

Ingolfur Blühdorn

"As for politics, I’m an anarchist. I hate governments and rules and fetters. Can’t stand caged animals. People must be free."

Charlie Chaplin

""It is ... a naivety that cannot be excused by anything to believe that a state can be total in the economic sphere without being so at the same time in the political and spiritual sphere ...." ... Democracy and socialism are not a tautology (à la Oskar), but radical, mutually exclusive opposites. Democracy is a method of limiting and controlling power. Socialism, on the other hand, always denies the individual freedom of choice of individuals over their economic preferences and life goals (supposedly in favor of the general public, the collective); thus socialism always assigns sovereignty over the decisive existential forces and life motivations to the state or a party or political cliques, and thus socialism is never a system or method for limiting power, but always and everywhere pseudo-moral justification for patronizing life, carte blanche for cynically moralizing unrestrained power."

Roland Baader

"Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges."

George Orwell

"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."

Mark Twain

"If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it"

Mark Twain

"But that is precisely why I am also deeply convinced that it is right that we have a representative democracy and not a plebiscitary democracy, and that representative democracy gives us the opportunity for certain periods of time to make decisions, then within these periods of time also to campaign for these decisions and thus to change opinions. Looking back at the history of the Federal Republic, we can say that all the major decisions did not have a demoscopic majority when they were made. The introduction of the social market economy, rearmament, the treaties with the East, the NATO dual decision, the adherence to unity, the introduction of the euro and also the increasing assumption of responsibility by the Bundeswehr in the world - almost all of these decisions were made against the majority of Germans. Only in retrospect did the attitude of the Germans change in many cases. I also think it's reasonable for the population to look at the outcome of a measure first and then form a judgment about it. I think that is an expression of the primacy of politics. And that should also be adhered to."

Dr. Angela Merkel

"In the portrayal of political processes, I often see a certain political one-sidedness. For example, when it comes to the topics of ecology or Europeanization, critics are always put in the right-wing corner. [....] The broadcasters adopt government lines in an undifferentiated manner. ARD and ZDF are increasingly acting as an acclamation forum for politics."

Professor Christoph Degenhart

"What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else."

Tom Clancy

"When you pay the representatives of the people, you do not arouse in them an interest in performing their functions conscientiously; rather, you interest them only in continuing to secure for themselves the exercise of those functions."

Benjamin Constant

"Every four years it elects the Bundestag. The lists or persons submitted to it by the parties are already elected beforehand by the parties. The process of this hidden preliminary election, which is the actual election, is convoluted; the names for the constituency lists and the state lists are not drawn up in the same way. But it is always the party committees, never the people, who would be involved in this decisive beginning. One must be a party member in order to participate somewhere in this election and to be able to be set up. Even those who are party members, as such, have little effect in the nominations. The decisive factor is the party hierarchy and bureaucracy.[...] Even the elections are not really elections, but acclamations to the party oligarchy. [....] The parties, which should by no means be the state, make themselves, withdrawn from the life of the people, the state [....] The governance of the state is in the hands of the party oligarchy [....] Their position, not limited by any tension to other power, seduces [....] the parties to want to occupy the seats by their own people. This is the reward for party work, the spoils of victory after the electoral battle [....]"

Karl Jaspers

"Whoever comes to power has passed through a filter that does not let decent people pass."

Ljudmila Ulitzkaya

"Of course, we live in a completely corrupted world where every government is just a bunch of businessmen working for a bunch of bigger businessmen and none of them give a shit about the people. The sad fact is no one knows how to change it, because no one knows how to take on the corporations. So I guess we’re stuck with this system until the oil runs out."

Woody Harrelson

"Someone once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. That may have been true when he said it, but today taxes are mostly the price we pay so that politicians can play Santa Claus and get reelected."

Thomas Sowell

"What I say is, that the real non-resistants can believe in direct action only, never in political action. For the basis of all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through."

Voltairine de Cleyre