Politics Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Politics

"It’s about what you would expect from a bipartisan democracy campaign — it’s an attempt to impose what is called democracy, meaning rule by the rich and the powerful, without interference by the mob but within the framework of formal electoral procedures."

Noam Chomsky

"In my own experience, I have been amazed to see how unrealistic are the bases for political opinion in general. Only rarely have I found a person who has chosen any particular political party - democratic or totalitarian - through study and comparison of principles."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing."

Thomas Sowell

"The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class."

Walter Lippmann

"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."

H. L. Mencken

"Politics is the entertainment branch of industry."

Frank Zappa

"If we let politicians break the law in an emergency, politicians will create an emergency so they can break the law."

Robert Higgs

"Laws are - even and especially in modern democracy - rarely instruments that enforce right against wrong, but mostly political tools with which the politically weak are exploited, robbed, suppressed and instrumentalized in favor of the politically strong."

Roland Baader

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

George Orwell

"Give the people a toy to keep them busy long enough, give them 'political parties'! Then they will waste all their energy and wit on meaningless occupation with individuals and other trivialities. So they won't bother us anymore, and we can run our business at will. But to keep the toy from getting boring eventually and the population's discontent from boiling over, a ritual game with a cathartic function as a pressure valve must be inserted at regular intervals. We call it "parliamentary elections," which sounds important. Then there is peace for the next four years, especially since everyone believes they decided something themselves. The media? They play our game all by themselves—without realizing it. Occasionally we give them a morsel when we want to functionally neutralize a somewhat more alert, and thus unwelcome, person or group. Then they are satisfied, and so is the population; after all, they have something to gossip about. By splitting the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energy fighting for battles over issues of no importance."

Montagu Norman

"Just as women supplement men in private life, so they will supplement men in public life by concentrating their organized efforts on those objects which men are likely to ignore. There is a tremendous field for women as active protagonists of new ideas and new methods of political and social housekeeping. When organized and conscious of their power to influence their surroundings, women can use their newly acquired freedom in a great many ways to mold the world into a better place to live in."

Edward Bernays

"Give politicians power and it certainly will be abused eventually - if not by today's politicians, then by their successors."

Harry Browne

"We don't decide anything. It's decided for us: by the 'markets' and, following their lead, by governments. One has to be careful with language, not to talk oneself into a responsibility one doesn't actually have or that's being taken away from one. 'We' don't need to consider what we'd prefer, because it doesn't matter anyway. Questions of economic order and the distribution of economic benefits are currently decided by summits and central bankers under pressure from large corporations, especially the financial sector. 'We' will only have a say when we understand that, fundamentally, we have no say at all."

Wolfgang Streeck

"The knowledge of the individual citizen is of less value than the knowledge of science. The former is the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective and is excluded from policies. The latter is objective - defined by science and promulgated by expert spokesmen. This objective knowledge is viewed as a commodity which can be refined... and fed into a process, now called decision-making. This new mythology of governance by the manipulation of knowledge-stock inevitably erodes reliance on government by people."

Ivan Illich

"…Whoever has the power in society determines what can be studied, determines what can be observed, determines what can be thought. Scientists fall in line with the dominant power structure. They have to, because the power structure pays the bills. You don’t play ball with the power structure, you don’t get money for research, you don’t get an appointment, you don’t get published, in short you don’t count anymore. You’re out. You might as well be dead."

Michael Crichton

"All politics, under democracy, resolves itself into a series of dynastic questions: the objective is always the job, not the principle."

H. L. Mencken

"Voting is the next-to-last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge, of course, is giving your opinion to a pollster."

Neil Postman

"In almost all matters, the real question should be: why are we letting government handle this?"

Harry Browne