Politics Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Politics

"Politically, sometimes you get situations where rent control will go through. It is especially true in an emergency, where there is a sudden, sharp increase in demand for housing or a cut back in supply. People will simply not allow the marketplace to allocate housing resources and so you get pressures for rent control. Once you have it, it is hard to eliminate."

James M. Buchanan

"You can get a coalition of senators from particular states in America, for example, who want to construct highways or dams or ports which may well be very inefficient. The taxes would be paid by the people over the whole country, but the benefits would go to the few people in those particular locations. This type of spending is a rather gross waste of resources that worsened over the years as the government has been allowed to do more particularized things."

James M. Buchanan

"The government and its chiefs do not have the powers of the mythical Santa Claus. They cannot spend except by taking out of the pockets of some people for the benefit of others."

Ludwig von Mises

"Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests."

Charles Wright Mills

"Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions."

Charles Wright Mills

"Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a grand scale."

Rudolf Virchow

"Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale."

Gore Vidal

"Democracy is four wolves and a sheep voting on dinner."

Robert A. Heinlein

"There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means."

Albert Jay Nock

"The social revolution is seriously compromised if it comes through a political revolution."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be."

Gore Vidal

"The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another."

Noam Chomsky

"All political entities are violent entities. But the type and degree of the use or threat of external violence against other similar entities plays a specific role in the structure and fate of political communities. Not every political entity is equally "expansive" in the sense that it seeks power externally, i.e., making force available for the purpose of acquiring political power over other territories and communities, whether in the form of incorporation or [of] dependency. The political entities are thus, to varying degrees, outwardly turned entities of violence."

Max Weber

"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

"Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians."

Milton Friedman

"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

"Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power."

Aldous Huxley