"I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces."

"All that I grasped was that to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind."

"More people than ever before look to government as their best chance of securing well-being rather than as their inevitable enemy. Politics as a contest to capture state power has at times apparently replaced religion (sometimes even appearing to eclipse market economics) as the focus of faith that can move mountains."

"Politics is the art of postponing decisions until they are no longer relevant."

"had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote."

"Perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it and seeing it, to found one in himself. But whether it exists anywhere or ever exists is no matter; for this is the only commonwealth in whose politics he can ever take part."

"Politics is nothing but common action to secure more favorable living conditions."

"All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs."

"When citizens are relatively equal, politics has tended to be fairly democratic. When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers. The reason for this pattern is simple. Through campaign contributions, lobbying, influence over public discourse, and other means, wealth can be translated into political power. When wealth is highly concentrated—that is, when a few individuals have enormous amounts of money—political power tends to be highly concentrated, too. The wealthy few tend to rule. Average citizens lose political power. Democracy declines."

"Politics is a harsh blood sport and the (Irish) electorate is not easily impressed."

"In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."

"In politics, wishful thinking just gives the wolves a license to howl."

"[T]he only mark-to-market thing in politics is Election Day; everything else is hot air."

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

"As far I'm concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they're just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we're fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries."

"Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen."

"I think there's a less than 5 percent chance that what I'd like to see happen actually happens. But it seems to me an obligation, even if it's a 5 percent chance, to try to make it happen. You could call it a triumph of hope over experience. But what else is politics if not that?"

"“I didn’t know that you were into politics.” “Anyone with money has to be. Real money, I mean. Even criminals need to keep a politician in their pockets these days.”"

"There's an increasing sense in our political life that in both parties politicians call themselves public servants but act like bosses who think that voters work for them. Physicians who routinely help the needy and the uninsured do not call themselves servants. They get to be called the 1%. Politicians who jerk around doctors, nurses and health systems call themselves servants, when of course they look more like little kings and queens instructing the grudging peasants in how to arrange their affairs."

"Politics is about being able to do things that your colleagues couldn't do, and for them to recognize that. What marks out successful leaders from the unsuccessful is their decisiveness, courage and clarity - a strategic vision."

"Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation."

"People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises."

"Politics: a Trojan horse race."

"Politics was for those who had too much to eat."

"Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."

"Furthermore, historians must not abandon political history entirely for sociology or cultural studies. Like it or not, politics matter to our societies and to our lives. We need only ask ourselves how different the world would have been if Hitler and the Nazis had not seized control of one of Europe’s most powerful states. Or what could have happened to American capitalism and the American people if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had not been able, as president, to implement the New Deal."

"I think it’s great that we (in the USA) have multiple female presidential candidates, so there’s not the woman running... I’m very excited about there being multiple women across — that can represent different parts of the political spectrum on the left, so that’s something that I’m thankful for... what we’re trying to do is is frame the debate and the conversation... that we’re going to be having in the next two years..."

"Political systems are self-destructive constructs. They possess a de-evolutionary or cannibalizing nature, locked firmly within closed-ended structures, micromanaged from top tiers, and endowed with an overwhelming capacity to crank out external controls in assembly-line fashion. With clockwork precision, these systems manufacture rules and a legal apparatus which in turn erect artificial barriers to prevent the optimizing processes of evolution and information fluidity."

"Politics is momentum."

"Acts of commemoration are the very stuff of politics; in and through our political process we decide who or what should be remembered or memorialized and in what ways. As David Thelen argues, “[M]emory, private and individual, as much as collective and cultural is constructed, not reproduced. . . . [T]his construction is not made in isolation but in conversations with others that occur in the contexts of community, broader politics, and social dynamics.” Should law and legal process lend themselves to these processes? Can they do so without compromising values central to law’s integrity? These normative questions have so far driven scholarship of law and memory."

"I will have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach to politics. I part company with the Congress and Gandhi. I do not believe in working up mob hysteria. Politics is a gentleman's game."

"In all times and ages, political crimes have always been punished more severely than others – even in the degenerate State of Nicholas II. The fact that in modern 'democracies' we lean towards political clemency proves only one thing: the loss of any sense of the 'political' in general."

"That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion."

"Good politics comes from love—love for the nation, the city, and the citizens. Normally, however, we only understand a concept when we are confronted with its contrary. We know what “hot” means by comparing it to “cold.” We may understand political charity by looking at its contrary, political malevolence. There are historical cases when rulers hate their citizens and seek to punish and destroy them."

": Despite the intentions of human politics, history has shown that it is often the one, not the many, who have led the world towards its destiny... now turn your eyes to Earth once more and tell me what you see."

"Many have argued that the basic question of Western political philosophy is why we accept to surrender a part of our liberty to join an organization. Wouldn’t it be better to remain free?"

"Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas."

"It is not nuclear violence alone that is the threat to mankind. It is the willingness to kill our fellow human beings – the innocent as well as the noninnocent- for political ends. Unless we are willing to redirect our time, energy, and resources away from perfecting the means of mass destruction of whatever sort and into exploring nonviolent alternatives to war itself, our efforts to combat the threat of nuclear war are likely to be of no avail."

"It has been pointed out often enough that politics takes on religious overtones when religion proper withers, at any rate among intellectuals."

"With regard to nuclear weapons, the situation is far more dangerous than the last Doomsday Clock report. New weapons systems under development are much more effectively dangerous. The Biden administration, expanding upon Trump’s confrontational approach, has Chomsky at a loss for words to describe the danger at hand. Only recently, Biden met with NATO leaders and instructed them to plan on two wars, China and Russia. According to Chomsky: “This is beyond insanity.” Not only that, the group is carrying out provocative acts when diplomacy is really needed. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation... It is important to emphasize that throughout history political parties that rely upon lies bring society down to its knees in piles of shameless destruction."

"Nothing lies outside the political sphere understood in this way. Everything has a political color. It is always in the political fabric - and never outside of it - that a person emerges as a free and responsible being, as a person in relationship with other people, as someone who takes on a historical task. Personal relationships themselves acquire an ever-increasing political dimension. Man enter into relationships among themselves through political means."

"According to Chomsky, the Doomsday Clock setting at 100 seconds to midnight is based upon: (1) global warming (2) nuclear war and (3) disinformation, or the collapse of any kind of rational discourse. As such, number three makes it impossible to deal with the first two major problems. Along those lines, within the Republican Party there’s virtually a disappearance of any pretense of rational discourse. Twenty-five (25%) percent of Republicans believe the government is run by an elite satanic group of pedophiles. Seventy percent (70%) of Republicans believe that the election was stolen. Only fifteen percent (15%) of Republicans believe that global warming is a serious problem. Therein lies an insurmountable problem to solving the main issues that continually tick the clock ever closer to a disaster scenario that will likely be unprecedented in the annals of warfare and environmental degradation. As a result, Chomsky says: “We’re living in a world of total illusion and fantasy.... Unless this is dealt with soon, it’ll be impossible to deal with the two major issues within the time span that we have available, which is not very long.”"

"... for our English grumbling is equally distributed between the weather and politics, and the case would be desperate when confined to the last."

"I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. "I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!""

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."

"There's no real power in Politics. Every day, it's all about whose turn it is to get punched in the face."

"Politics is policy. What policy should you follow in view of the idea that there isn’t enough to go around — the power of the few, or the needs of the many? Political economy is based on misassumptions... That’s the basis of all politics: it has to be you or me, there’s not enough for both of us. Survival of the fittest... But we can do so much now, with so little, that we can take care of everybody. That’s why the idea of scarcity is all wrong. Up to now, the world of politics doesn’t know that. That’s why all nations are dependent on armaments, why we have the arms race. The politicians still say that it’s you or me, and that’s why they go for the gun... The young world is giving up any interest in their political system. They have decided that it is absolutely corrupt."

"Life isn’t binary — and neither is politics. If you are adrift in the ocean, your enemy isn’t just sharks; it’s thirst, hunger, drowning, and despair itself. If you face your predicament assuming the only thing you have to worry about is being eaten by a shark, you might fend off the sharks, but you will also probably die. Indeed, by ignoring other threats, you’d probably make yourself more vulnerable to a shark attack."

"I say that politics is the most important of the civil activities and has its own field of action, which is not that of religion. Political institutions are secular by definition and operate in independent spheres. All my predecessors have said the same thing, for many years at least, albeit with different accents. I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I'm here."