Quotes on Politics

If virtuous, the government need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting the truth, either in religion, law, or politics.

I am not myself apt to be alarmed at innovations recommended by reason. That dread belongs to those whose interests or prejudices shrink from the advance of truth and science.

Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government.

Everyone must act according to the dictates of his own reason.

We are now vibrating between too much and too little government, and the pendulum will rest finally in the middle.

To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.

Government as well as religion has furnished its schisms, its persecutions and its devices for fattening idleness on the earnings of the people.

It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that [a society without government, as among our Indians] is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population.

The excellence of every government is its adaptation to the state of those to be governed by it.

The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.

It will be said that great societies cannot exist without government.

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows - marriage does.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.

The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.

In too many instances, the march to globalization has also meant the marginalization of women and girls. And that must change.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.