Politics

"Money and generous benefits can easily alter a person’s political outlook. Ideology follows the money."

"Campaign promises are—by long democratic tradition—the least binding form of human commitment."

"Politics is a consequence of how a person understands their experience."

"I was dealing with a political story where much of the action took place on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and one of the edicts that came down from the Mt. Sinai of advertisers row was that at no time in a political drama must a speech or a character be equated with an existing political party or current political problems. So several million viewers were treated to an incredible display of senators shouting, gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics, saying not a single thing germane to the current political scene."

"Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics."

"Politics is simply the way human beings treat one another on the earth."

"I don't understand how people can disconnect politics from daily life, because that's how politics count. We're daily life people and that's where politics become a reality to us."

"The separation between politics and economics, between state and civil society is how the bourgeois society appears and presents itself. But it is not its real essence. In reality, politics is the quintessence, or the concentrated form of economics. The political sphere is built on the sphere of production, and there is a close relationship between those who command production and those who wield power."

"I have no faith in political arithmetic."

"Politics: the art of convincing decent people to forget the lesser of two evils is also evil."

"A coalition is by definition made up of people who have something in common, not everything in common."

"To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect."

"The only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring, as Dick Nixon would say."

"“Our ideas” are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people, of our teachers (in the broadest sense of the term) and of our teachers’ teachers; they are abbreviations and residues of the thought of the past. These thoughts were once explicit and in the center of consideration and discussion. It may even be presumed that they were once perfectly lucid. By being transmitted to later generations they have possibly been transformed, and there is no certainty that the transformation was effected consciously and with full clarity. … This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas."

"[P]olitics is always just a few steps away from The Lord of the Flies..."

"The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and strong passions from the pursuit of power; and it frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortunes of the state until he has shown himself incompetent to conduct his own."

"Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves,—sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but States, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence."

"The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer."

"Throned above all, in a manner without parallel in all past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic, and delivering oracles in a language not understood of the people."

"A leader has to lead, or otherwise he has no business in politics."

"Political relations are based on self-interest: benefits to be gained and losses to be avoided. For the most part, man’s politics is determined by his evaluation of material good and evil. Politics results from a conflict of interests, not of consciences."

"What people believe and what they’ll do because they believe it is a big part of what’s real, especially in politics."

"Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them."

"Take the so-called politics of fear — the constant reference to risks, from hoodies on the street corner to international terrorism. Whatever the truth of these risks and the best ways of dealing with them, the politics of fear plays on an assumption that people cannot bear the uncertainties associated with them. Politics then becomes a question of who can better deliver an illusion of control."

"The term “political overconfidence” should be at the front of our awareness in political discussions, and the political overconfidence we should each be most aware of and most eager to expose is, of course, our own."

"Politics is people."

"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism."

"Why is it the Mongols of this world always tell us they're defending us against the Mongols?"

"I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest."

"Aristocracy and exclusiveness tend to final overthrow, in language as in politics."

"A cult is a religion with no political power."

"Such are the times, that the mere presentation of a can be a political act."

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

"Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

"Politics is like bad cinema — people overact, take it too far. When I speak with politicians, I see this in their facial expressions, their eyes, the way they squint. I look at things like a producer. I would often watch a scene on the monitor, and the director and I would yell, ‘Stop, no more, this is unwatchable! No one will believe this.’"

"Man is by nature a civic animal."

"All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."

"You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe."

"Of this stamp is the cant of, not men, but measures."

"Away with the cant of "Measures, not men!"—the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing."

"One of the greatest of Romans, when asked what were his politics, replied, "Imperium et libertas." That would not make a bad programme for a British Ministry."

"Here the two great interests IMPERIUM ET LIBERTAS, res olim insociabiles (saith Tacitus), began to incounter each other."

"It is a condition which confronts us—not a theory."

"Information upon points of practical politics."

"All political power is a trust."

"Oh! we'll give 'em Jessie When we rally round the polls."

"Measures, not men, have always been my mark."

"Who, born for the universe, narrow'd his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind."

"Who will burden himself with your liturgical parterre when the burning questions [brennende Fragen] of the day invite to very different toils?"

"Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct."