Politics Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Politics

"A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible."

Frank Patrick Herbert

"Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions."

Jonathan Swift

"Successful ... politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies."

Walter Lippmann

"Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing."

Neil Postman

"So what is government?... Very simply, it is an agency of coercion. Of course, there are other agencies of coercion - such as the Mafia. So to be more precise, government is the agency of coercion that has flags in front of its offices."

Harry Browne

"Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government-- in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player."

Milton Friedman

"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

H. L. Mencken

"Everything we know about human nature and about government tells us that individuals using their own money will achieve far more good for themselves and far more for others than politicians spending money they didn't have to work to earn."

Harry Edson Browne

"Government is force, pure and simple. There's no way to sugar-coat that. And because government is force, it will attract the worst elements of society - people who want to use government to avoid having to earn their living and to avoid having to persuade others to accept their ideas voluntarily."

Harry Browne

"We govern what the public think about."

Edward Bernays

"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."

Henry Louis Mencken

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable."

George Orwell

"We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time."

Edward Bernays

"When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers."

Walter Lippmann

"Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon."

Walter Lippmann

"Democracy is just a filler for textbooks! Do you actually believe that public opinion influences the government?"

Voltaire

"The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third."

Voltaire