Quotes on Politics

I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a 400 basball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.

Politics is so personal, vicious and immediate, how are you going to get anything done? Even the local politics where I live have gotten so ugly.

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying - lying to others and to yourself.

The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.

I like the job. That's what I'll miss the most... I'm not sure anybody ever liked this as much as I've liked it.

You have to be able to interact with people whose politics you disagree with.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

It's an honor putting art above politics. Politics can be seductive in terms of things reductive to the soul.

A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

Damn your principles! Stick to your party.

Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.

Envy creates the beginning of strife.

Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.

Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them must share the guilt for the dead.

No tyranny is more cruel than the one practised in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice - when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves. And since a tyrant never lacks instruments for his tyranny, Tiberius always found judges ready to condemn as many people as he might suspect.

Experts are just trained dogs.

The fact that people die because of an AK-47 is not because of the designer, but because of politics.

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.