Quotes on Politics

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

He has to conceal what he would most wish to make public, and make public what he would most wish to conceal.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

Here we are the way politics ought to be in America; the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose and the politics of joy.

It is much easier to ride a horse in the direction it is going.

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.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

When wealth is centralized, the people are dispersed. When wealth is distributed, the people are brought together.

When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

Poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue; it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.

You can build a throne with bayonets, but it's difficult to sit on it.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I did not take the oath I have just taken with the intention of presiding over the dissolution of the world's strongest economy.

Trouble is, we call politics a game, but it isn't one. There is no referee, and the teams make up the rules as they go along. You can't cry foul or offside in politics. Almost anything goes.

May the States be so bound to each other as forever to defy European politics. Upon that union, their consequence, their happiness, will depend. This is the first wish of a heart more truly American than words can express.

...the life which is best for men, both separately, as individuals, and in the mass, as states, is the life which has virtue sufficiently supported by material resources to facilitate participation in the actions that virtue calls for.