Quotes on Politics

America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.

Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.

I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in 'We, the people.'

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

In the lexicon of the political class, the word 'sacrifice' means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with most unnecessary attention but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of man who have folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

Government has coddled, accepted, and ignored white collar crime for too long. It is time the nation woke up and realized that it's not the armed robbers or drug dealers who cause the most economic harm, it's the white collar criminals living in the most expensive homes who have the most impressive resumes who harm us the most. They steal our pensions, bankrupt our companies, and destroy thousands of jobs, ruining countless lives.

At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.

'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

At least there's a political input, but when you put on the robe, at that point the politics is over.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

The potential for the abuse of power through digital networks - upon which we the people now depend for nearly everything, including our politics - is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age.

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.