Politics Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Politics

"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 government you elect is the government you deserve."

Thomas Jefferson

"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

"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

"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

"When you give politicians the power to do what you think is right you're automatically giving politicians the power to do what you think is wrong."

Harry Browne

"We may not always recognize it, but government plays a bigger role in our lives than any other single person or institution. We spend nearly half of our lives working to pay for it. Children spend more time in government schools than they do with their parents. Birth, death, marriage, every area of our lives feels the influence of government."

Harry Browne

"The problem is big government. If whoever controls government can impose his way upon you, you have to fight constantly to prevent the control from being harmful. With small, limited government, it doesn't much matter who controls it, because it can't do you much harm."

Harry Browne

"Government doesn't work. That's the first lesson we must learn if we want to improve society."

Harry Browne