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Published Tuesday, November 06, 2012 @ 7:52 AM EST
Nov 06 2012

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Quote-A-Palooza: Election Day Edition!
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Published Tuesday, November 06, 2012 @ 6:54 AM EST
Nov 06 2012

474 quotations about democracy, elections, politics and voting which will delight and/or enrage you.

A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments.
-Aristotle

A democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
-Gore Vidal

A democracy needs an opposition, especially in time of war, precisely to keep the government honest, and to point to whatever errors (or possible errors) it finds in the government's actions.
-Eugene Volokh

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

A gaffe occurs not when a politician lies, but when he tells the truth.
-Michael Kinsley

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
-H.L. Mencken

A hungry child knows no politics.
-Ronald Reagan

A lot has been said about politics; some of it complimentary, but most of it accurate.
-Eric Idle

A lot of people voting for Pat Buchanan say they are doing so to send a message. Apparently that message is, "Hey, look at me, I'm an idiot."
-Dennis Miller

A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.
-Dan Quayle

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
-Norman Mailer

A political convention just is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.
-Murray Kempton

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.
-Bernard Baruch

A politician is a guy who would lay down your life for his country.
-Mary Louis Cecelia Texas Guinan

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
-H.L. Mencken

A politician should have three hats. One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected.
-Carl Sandburg

A politician will do anything to keep his job- even become a patriot.
-William Randolph Hearst

A politician's willingness to listen to good advice rises in inverse proportion to how badly he thinks he is doing.
-Pat Caddell

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
-H.L. Mencken

A society is not "free" merely because the freedoms the people are doing away with are those they voted at the last election to do without.
-William F. Buckley, Jr.

A statesman is a successful politician who is dead.
-Thomas B. Reed

A statesman is any politician it's considered safe to name a school after.
-Bill Vaughan

A statesman makes the occasion, but the occasion makes the politician.
-G.S. Hilliard

A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
-O. Henry

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.
-H.G. Wells

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.
-Theodore Roosevelt

A week is a long time in politics.
-Harold Wilson

Advertising men and politicians are dangerous if they are separated. Together they are diabolical.
-Phillip Adams

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.
-Brooks Atkinson

Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom.
-Aldous Huxley

All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
-George Orwell

All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph or reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.
-Albert Einstein

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
-John Arbuthnot

All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.
-James Reston

All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later.
-Ernest Hemingway

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are "up to a point."
-George F. Will

All truly great achievements in history resulted from the actualization of principles, not from the clever evaluation of political conditions.
-Henry Kissinger

Although He is regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.
-George Mitchell

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
-John Quincy Adams

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the Course."
-Lee Iacocca

America is a democracy and has no Hitler, but I am afraid for her future; there are hard times ahead for the American people, troubles will be coming from within and without. America cannot smile away their Negro problem nor Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are cosmic laws.
-Albert Einstein

America is a land where a citizen will cross the ocean to fight for democracy- and won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
-Bill Vaughan

Americans believe that freedom was their invention. They have been known to send peace-corps troops to Athens to teach the Greeks the meaning of democracy.
-Peter Ustinov

Americans have a tendency to think the problem with politics lies with their candidates and not themselves. The truth is Americans deserve the blame for the state of our politics and the state of our media.
-Jonah Goldberg

Americans like to talk about (or be told about) Democracy but, when put to the test, usually find it to be an "inconvenience." We have opted instead for an authoritarian system disguised as a Democracy. We pay through the nose for an enormous joke-of-a-government, let it push us around, and then wonder how all those assholes got in there.
-Frank Zappa

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
-George Eliot

An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.
-Simon Cameron

An Independent is someone who wants to take the politics out of politics.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

Any sufficiently advanced coup is indistinguishable from an election.
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life.
-Elmer Davis

As an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies have done in the name of defending us against subversion.
-Murray Kempton

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
-H.L. Mencken

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.
-Abraham Lincoln

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans... unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.
-Karl Rove

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
-Gore Vidal

As the master politician navigates the ship of state, he both creates and responds to public opinion. Adept at tacking with the wind, he also succeeds, at times, in generating breezes of his own.
-Stewart Udall

Ask a man which way he is going to vote, and he will probably tell you. Ask him, however, why, and vagueness is all.
-Bernard Levin

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
-George J. Nathan

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.
-Eugene McCarthy

By sending the contradictory message that the famous are just plain folks on Mount Olympus, America has forged a relentless tension between loftiness and accessibility. Stir in the fact that the inborn talent and intelligence needed to achieve fame are immune to distributive tinkering by government programs and you have a definition of fame certain to produce envious rage: somebody screwed democracy.
-Florence King

Children are the universal scapegoats for any political agenda.
-Unattributed

Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.
-Florence King

Churches are becoming political organizations... It probably will not be long until the churches will divide as sharply upon political, as upon theological questions; and when that day comes, if there are not liberals enough to hold the balance of power, this Government will be destroyed. The liberty of man is not safe in the hands of any church. Wherever the Bible and sword are in partnership, man is a slave.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

Comedians and politicians each tell the audience what it wants to hear. The difference is that the audience laughs at the comedian and the politician laughs at the audience.
-Alexis A. Gilliland

Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.
-Peter Ustinov

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.
-Alan Coren

Democracy demands that all of its citizens begin the race even. Egalitarianism insists that they all finish even.
-Roger Price

Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.
-C.S. Lewis

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions- it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
-Irving Kristol

Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.
-John Simon

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
-James Russell Lowell

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
-George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.
-Doug Larson

Democracy is a genus, not a species. Getting a democracy is rather like getting a "mammal" for a gift. Kittens are nice. Wolverines will lunch on your eyeballs. You don't drop a wolverine in your friend's lap, and then walk away feeling you've done him a favor, since "the best pets are mammals."
-Will Wilkinson

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
-H.L. Mencken

Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
-Laurence J. Peter

Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences.
-James Bryant Conant

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
-H.L. Mencken

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.
-Jorge Luis Borges

Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
-Harry Emerson Fosdick

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.
-Robert Byrne

Democracy is buying a big house you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you wish were dead.
-Johnny Carson

Democracy is fine by me, but sometimes I'm not sure about you. (song lyrics)
-Garrison Keillor

Democracy is like a raft. It won't sink, but you'll always have your feet wet.
-Russell B. Long

Democracy is mob rule, but with income taxes.
-Unattributed

Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants.
-Lucias Annaeus Seneca

Democracy is no harlot to be picked up in the street by a man with a tommy gun.
-Winston Churchill

Democracy is people of all races, colors, and creeds united by a single dream: to get rich and move to the suburbs away from people of all races, colors, and creeds.
-Johnny Carson

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
-H.L. Mencken

Democracy is the crude leading the crud.
-Florence King

Democracy is the eagle on the back of a dollar bill, with 13 arrows in one claw, 13 leaves on a branch, 13 tail feathers, and 13 stars over its head. This signifies that when the white man came to this country, it was bad luck for the Indians, bad luck for the trees, bad luck for the wildlife, and lights out for the American eagle.
-Johnny Carson

Democracy is the name we give to the people when we need them.
-Robert Pelleve

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
-Sydney J. Harris

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
-E.B. White

Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-H.L. Mencken

Democracy is too good to share with just anybody.
-Nigel Rees

Democracy is welcoming people from other lands, and giving them something to hold onto- usually a mop or a leaf blower.
-Johnny Carson

Democracy means free television; not good television, but free.
-Johnny Carson

Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.
-Clement Attlee

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
-G.K. Chesterton

Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president.
-Johnny Carson

Democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be the milkman.
-Winston Churchill

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
-James Bovard

Democracy simply means the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
-Oscar Wilde

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-George Bernard Shaw

Democracy, like any non-coercive relationship, rests on a shared understanding of limits.
-Elizabeth Drew

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong?
-Don Marquis

Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?
-Robert Orben

Don't get mad. Don't get even. Just get elected, then get even.
-James Carville

Don't vote. It only encourages them.
-Unattributed

During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa.
-Henry Adams

Elected office holds more perks than Elvis' nightstand.
-Dennis Miller

Elected officials should be limited to two terms: one in office and one in prison.
-Kinky Friedman

Election year is that period when politicians get free speech mixed up with cheap talk.
-J.B. Kidd

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.
-Franklin P. Adams

Engineering is the implementation of science; politics is the implementation of faith.
-Marc Stiegler

Envy is the basis of democracy.
-Bertrand Russell

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
-H.L. Mencken

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Every politician we have, liberal or conservative, who gets caught drinking or chasing women is thrown out of office. It's backwards. It's more dangerous to have a clean-living President with his finger on the button. He thinks he's going right to heaven. You want to feel safe with a leader? Give me a guy who fights in bars and cheats on his wife. This is a man who wants to put off Judgment Day as long as possible.
-Larry Miller

Everybody believes in democracy until he reaches the White House
-Thomas Cronin

Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.
-Charles Peguy

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.
-John Adams

Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
-Richard M. Nixon

Florida's number three industry, behind tourism and skin cancer, is voter fraud.
-Dave Barry

Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
-Walter Lippmann

For a politician to complain about the press is like a ship's captain complaining about the sea.
-Enoch Powell

Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market means they are on sale to the highest bidder.
-Arundhati Roy

Freedom is when the people can speak, democracy is when the government listens.
-Alasdair Farrugia

Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
-Frank Dane

Give voters a choice between a Republican and a Republican, and they will choose a Republican every time.
-Harry S Truman

Given a choice between two bald political candidates, the American people will vote for the less bald of the two.
-Vic Gold

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
-H.L. Mencken

Government is too big and important to be left to the politicians.
-Chester Bowles

Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for President- the same half?
-Gore Vidal

Here's the thing about rights. They're not supposed to be voted on. That's why they call them rights.
-Rachel Maddow

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly, it is not a sufficient condition.
-Milton Friedman

How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.
-Henry Miller

I am tired of hearing that democracy doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work. We are supposed to work it.
-Alexander Woollcott

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy- but that could change.
-Dan Quayle

I didn't vote for change, but that's all I have left.
-Unattributed

I don't know a lot about politics, but I can recognize a good party man when I see one.
-Mae West

I hate all bungling as I do sin, but particularly bungling in politics, which leads to the misery and ruin of many thousands and millions of people.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have never found in a long experience of politics that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.
-Harold Macmillan

I have no use for those- regardless of their political party- who hold some foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when unorganized labor was a huddled, almost helpless mass.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.
-E.B. White

I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
-Thomas Jefferson

I like to remind people the choice the American electorate had in 1796 for candidates for President. You could choose between the chairman of the American Society of Arts and Letters and the founding president of the American Academy of Sciences. There's been a bit of a decline in the standards of candidacy since then.
-Christopher Hitchens

I love a dog. He does nothing for political reasons.
-Will Rogers

I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.
-William F. Buckley, Jr.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
-John Adams

I reject the cynical view that politics is inevitably, or even usually, a dirty business.
-Richard M. Nixon

I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough.
-Claire Sargent

I voted for the Democrats because I didn't like the way the Republicans were running the country. Which is turning out to be like shooting yourself in the head to stop your headache.
-Jack Mayberry

I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there.
-Maureen Reagan

I'll be glad to either reply to or dodge your questions, whichever I think will help our election most.
-George Herbert Walker Bush

I'm sorry, but voting for a presidential candidate because you like the choice for vice president is like getting married to a woman because you like her cat.
-Kevin G. Barkes

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.
-Bill Moyers

Ideas matter in American politics, but results matter more.
-Dan Balz

If a jerk burns the flag, America is not threatened, democracy is not under siege, freedom is not at risk.
-Gary Ackerman

If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of [chasing women] and drinking, you'd have no government.
-Barry M. Goldwater

If God had wanted us to vote, He would have given us candidates.
-Jay Leno

If one [political] party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read "Views Differ on Shape of Planet."
-Paul Krugman

If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism; if our government is to function, it must have dissent.
-Henry Steele Commager

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
-Orson Scott Card

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
-Evelyn Waugh

If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates (book title)
-Jim Hightower

If there are twelve clowns in a ring, you can jump in the middle and start reciting Shakespeare, but to the audience, you'll just be the thirteenth clown. (Walinsky's First Law of Political Campaigns)
-Unattributed

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
-Emma Goldman

If you begin by saying, "Thou shalt not lie," there is no longer any possibility of political action.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

If you can't take money from people and then screw them, you have no business being a politician.
-San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr.

If you don't vote, then you may be leaving the decisions up to someone dumber than you.
-Jesse Ventura

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.
-Ray Bradbury

If you doubt that it is stinky personality that is the driving force behind conservative politics, look back to your pre-political youth. A dollar to a doughnut everyone of those childhood friends and acquaintances who was an asshole then is a conservative today.
-Rack Jite

If you ever injected truth into politics you'd have no politics.
-Will Rogers

If you make less than $50,000 a year and vote Republican, you are a moron.
-Rack Jite

If you voted for change, you better start counting it.
-Unattributed

If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons.
-Alice Cooper

If you're sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and principles, come and join this campaign.
-George W. Bush

In 1929 the wise, far-seeing electors of my native Hereford sent me to Westminster and, two years later, the lousy bastards kicked me out.
-Frank Owen

In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.
-Senator J. William Fulbright

In a democracy, the votes of the vicious and stupid count. On the other hand, in any other system, they might be running the show. (from The Boston Globe)
-Unattributed

In a democracy, you don't look up to people, you look sideways at your fellow citizens.
-Robert Hughes

In a democracy, you say what you like and do what you're told.
-Dave Barry

In a political fight, when you've got nothing in favor of your side, start a row in the opposition camp.
-Huey P. Long

In America the absence of honest passion is a distinguishing feature of both professional wrestling and politics.
-Murray Kempton

In democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes.
-Mogens Jallberg

In every well governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
-Anatole France

In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in twelve years, we'll be voting for plants.
-Lewis Black

In nature, stupidity gets you killed. In the workplace, it gets you fired. In politics, it gets you re-elected.
-Bill VanRemmen

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
-Charles de Gaulle

In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
-P.J. O'Rourke

In our system, at about 11:30 on election night, they just push you off the edge of the cliff and that's it. You might scream on the way down, but you're going to hit the bottom, and you're not going to be in elective office.
-Walter Mondale

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
-George Orwell

In political combat, as in speed contests among horses, the outcome becomes doubtful only after the entry of the second contestant.
-Warren Burnett

In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.
-Charles de Gaulle

In politics the middle way is none at all.
-John Adams

In politics there is no honor.
-Benjamin Disraeli

In politics you can't be true to all of your friends all of the time.
-Perry S. Heath

In politics you have no friends, only allies.
-John F. Kennedy

In politics you must always keep running with the pack. The moment that you falter and they sense that you are injured, the rest will turn on you like wolves.
-R.A. Butler

In politics, a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendship.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

In politics, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.
-San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr.

In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.
-Margaret Thatcher

In politics, nothing is contemptible.
-Benjamin Disraeli

In politics, nothing is permanent and, therefore, nothing is too late.
-Bill Clinton

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In the US the people are blinkered by the millions of flags that flutter on the forest of poles and hang from every other window. They block the political view and the thunder of their flapping means that even anxious questions, let alone protests, cannot, will not, be heard.
-Phillip Adams

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued- they may be essential to survival.
-Noam Chomsky

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities.
-Ayn Rand

Information is the currency of democracy.
-Thomas Jefferson

Instant analysis is the occupational disease. There are no smokestacks, there's no black lung. Politics is the only industry.
-Kirk O'Donnell

Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.
-Doug Larson

It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.
-Charles Kuralt

It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.
-Unattributed

It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows.
-George Orwell

It is exciting to have a real crisis on your hands, when you have spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment.
-Margaret Thatcher

It is futile to try and win democracy abroad, while we are losing it at home. (in a letter to President Woodrow Wilson)
-Upton Sinclair

It is known, however, that men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.
-C. Northcote Parkinson

It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil,... that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.
-George McGovern

It makes no difference who you vote for- the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
-Gore Vidal

It's kind of ironic. The only time you can be really be sure that a politician is telling the truth is when he's admitting that he's a crook.
-Jay Leno

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
-Tom Stoppard

Just as it would be madness to settle on medical treatment for the body of a person by taking an opinion poll of the neighbors, so it is irrational to prescribe for the body politic by polling the opinions of the people at large.
-Plato

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.
-Pericles

Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why the word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
-Gore Vidal

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
-John Boynton Priestley

Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.
-Erich Fromm

Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.
-Larry Flynt

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
-Reinhold Neibuhr

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
-Henry Adams

Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be President but they don't want them to become politicians in the process.
-John F. Kennedy

My early choice in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.
-Harry S Truman

My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general. "They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to."
-Gore Vidal

My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.
-Albert Einstein

My political life has been informed by the view that if there was any truth to religion there wouldn't really be any need for politics.
-Christopher Hitchens

Never judge a country by its politicians.
-Alfred Hitchcock

Never pass up an opportunity to appear on C-Span. C-Span viewers vote.
-Lamar Alexander

Never vote for the best candidate. Vote for the one who will do the least harm.
-Frank Dane

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.
-Henry Kissinger

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.
-Lily Tomlin

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
-Walter Lippmann

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
-Jacob Bronowski

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.
-Mark B. Cohen

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Nothing would induce me to vote for giving women the franchise. I am not going to be hen-pecked into a question of such importance. (in 1910)
-Winston Churchill

Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.
-Bob Edwards

Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far as blather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material.
-Anton Chekhov

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger. (At the Nuremberg Trials)
-Herman Goering

On account of us being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.
-Will Rogers

Once there were two brothers: one ran away to sea, the other was elected Vice-President- and nothing was ever heard from either of them again.
-Thomas Marshall

Once upon a time my political opponents honored me as possessing the fabulous intellectual and economic power by which I created a worldwide depression all by myself.
-Herbert Hoover

One has the right to be wrong in a democracy.
-Claude Pepper

One of the merits of democracy is quite obvious: it is perhaps the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based on propositions that are palpably not true- and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true.
-H.L. Mencken

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
-Plato

Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government ever heard of on earth.
-H.L. Mencken

Only lie about the future. (to politicians)
-Johnny Carson

Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
-Matt Taibbi

Our elections are free, it's in the results where eventually we pay.
-Bill Stern

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.
-Bertrand Russell

Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work.
-Michael Novak

People are taking the comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.
-Will Rogers

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.
-Otto von Bismarck

People vote their resentment, not their appreciation. The average man does not vote for anything but against something.
-H.H. Munro Saki

People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.
-James Harvey Robinson

Political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much.
-Paul Krugman

Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion.
-Samuel J. Ervin

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject for study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.
-W.H. Auden

Political language- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
-George Orwell

Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
-Hannah Arendt

Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again.
-Woody Allen

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
-Tom Lehrer

Politically popular speech has always been protected: even the Jews were free to say "Heil Hitler."
-Isaac Asimov

Politicians and diapers have one thing in common. They should both be changed regularly and for the same reason.
-Gerry Brooks

Politicians and journalists share the same fate in that they often understand tomorrow the things they talk about today.
-Helmut Schmidt

Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.
-Buckminster Fuller

Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Politicians are like ships: noisiest when lost in a fog.
-Bennett Cerf

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.
-John Quinton

Politicians are swine. You cannot reason with swine. You must hit them on the nose with a stick.
-Bertolt Brecht

Politicians are the same the world over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river.
-Nikita Kruschev

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.
-George F. Will

Politicians only get to the top because they have no qualifications to detain them at the bottom.
-Peter Ustinov

Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork.
-Harold Lowman

Politics and the shape of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't concern themselves with politics.
-Albert Camus

Politics are a lousy way for a free man to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
-Winston Churchill

Politics are not the task of a Christian.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.
-Vera Brittain

Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.
-Paul Krugman

Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.
-Will Rogers

Politics have no relation to morals.
-Niccolò Machiavelli

Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perpetually rejuvenated illusions.
-Albert Einstein

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

Politics is about compromises... really stupid compromises.
-Bill Maher

Politics is about who wins and loses. The rest is of marginal interest.
-Sean Wilentz

Politics is an act of faith; you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public.
-George McGovern

Politics is applesauce.
-Will Rogers

Politics is applied biology.
-Ernst Haeckel

Politics is developing more comedians than radio ever did.
-Jimmy Durante

Politics is how you live your life, not whom you vote for.
-Jerry Rubin

Politics is just like show business, you have a hell of an opening, coast for a while and then have a hell of a close.
-Ronald Reagan

Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.
-Unattributed

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.
-Edouard Herriot

Politics is like the bumper cars at the amusement park. It's a delusion to think that by refusing to move, you can protect yourself from being hit. (From The Weekly Standard)
-Unattributed

Politics is like the stock market: it's a bad business for people who can't afford to lose.
-Richard M. Nixon

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.
-Dalton Camp

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
-Ronald Reagan

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

Politics is show business for ugly people.
-Sonny Bono

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.
-Hunter S. Thompson

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

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
-Ernest Benn

Politics is the art of postponing decisions until they are no longer relevant.
-Henri Queuille

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

Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
-Ambrose Bierce

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.
-Frank Zappa

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.
-Oscar Ameringer

Politics is the pursuit of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
-George J. Nathan

Politics is the science of who gets what, when, and why.
-Sidney Hillman

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
-Lester B. Pearson

Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom.
-Jim Hightower

Politics should be limited in scope to war, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people.
-Richard M. Nixon

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
-Henry Adams

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.
-Richard Armour

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-Ambrose Bierce

Politics: the art of keeping as many balls as possible up in the air at one time- while protecting your own.
-Sam Attlesey

Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.
-Jimmy Breslin

Practical politics consists of ignoring facts.
-Henry Adams

Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

Ralph Nader is as much of politician as Bob Packwood, only he's not as smooth with the ladies.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
-John Adams

Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy.
-Gloria Steinem

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things... a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is always astonished when others do.
-Charles de Gaulle

Some politician some years ago said that bad officials are elected by good voters who do not vote.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

Son, if you can't take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and then vote against 'em, you don't deserve to be here.
-Sam Rayburn

Son, in politics you've got to learn that overnight chicken shit can turn to chicken salad.
-Lyndon B. Johnson

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
-Shimon Peres

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.
-George Washington

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

The best time to listen to a politician is when he's on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he's exhausted. Then he doesn't lie.
-Theodore H. White

The biggest and most pertinent lesson in history-at least for democracies-is that they cannot take their existence for granted.
-Norman Cousins

The central conservative truth is that is it culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The death of a democracy is not likely to be an assassination by ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
-Robert M. Hutchins

The difference between a politician and a statesman is: a politician thinks of the next election and a statesman thinks of the next generation.
-James Freeman Clarke

The difference between a prostitute and a politician is that there are some things a prostitute won't do for money.
-Unattributed

The difference between a real horse race an election is that in a horse race the whole horse wins.
-Unattributed

The difference between corporations and governments is governments have a monopoly on force. It's a lot easier to vote with your feet or your wallet than it is to change a government with your vote.
-P.J. O'Rourke

The difference between politics and baseball is that in baseball, when you get caught stealing, you're out.
-Ron Dentinger

The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying the cure for crime is more crime.
-H.L. Mencken

The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. (speech at the 1787 Constitutional Convention)
-Elbridge Gerry

The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.
-Theodore H. White

The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.
-Paul Krugman

The good news is I'm leading in the polls. The bad news is the election isn't tomorrow.
-George W. Bush

The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid.
-Art Spander

The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

The introduction of religious passion into politics is the end of honest politics, and the introduction of politics into religion is the prostitution of true religion.
-Lord Hailsham

The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as though he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.
-Aldous Huxley

The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.
-William C. Westmoreland

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other.
-Will Rogers

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.
-Noam Chomsky

The most important political office is that of private citizen.
-Louis Brandeis

The next time they give you all that civic bullshit about voting, keep in mind that Hitler was elected in a full, free democratic election.
-George Carlin

The office of the president is such a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy, that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.
-Jimmy Breslin

The only difference between [George W.] Bush and [Adolf] Hitler is that Hitler was elected.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The only way to win an election by a greater margin than Saddam Hussein in Iraq is to be a Democratic candidate in Chicago.
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by a mass media notoriously phony.
-Paul Goodman

The other day, someone told me the difference between a democracy and a people's democracy. It's the same difference between a jacket and a straitjacket.
-Ronald Reagan

The political arena leaves one no alternative; one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
-Emma Goldman

The political spectrum isn't a line so much as a circle, and no matter which direction you head from 12 o'clock, you eventually wind up on the bottom by the hatch where the cuckoos pop out.
-Tamara K (Indiana blogger)

The politician is an acrobat. He keeps his balance by saying the opposite of what he does.
-Maurice Barres

The politicians were talking themselves red, white and blue in the face. (on campaigning)
-Clare Boothe Luce

The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment- social, political, or ethical- can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.
-John Steinbeck

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.
-Henry Cote

The proposition, that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties, is not true; they are the worst conceivable; they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will, as a political body.
-John Adams

The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not commit adultery," and "Thou shalt not lie" in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.
-George Carlin

The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.
-Maureen Murphy

The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work; then they get elected and prove it.
-P.J. O'Rourke

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success disgraceful.
-H.L. Mencken

The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
-James Fenimore Cooper

The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.
-Molly Ivins

The thing about politicians is, you have to take the smooth with the smooth.
-Susan Hill

The trouble with politicians debating each other is that there isn't any subject that's any of their business.
-Robert Brault

The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time.
-Franklin P. Adams

The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.
-Edward Dowling

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The ultimate failures of dictatorship cost humanity far more than any temporary failures of democracy.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-H.L. Mencken

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
-Gustave Flaubert

The word "politics" is derived from the word "poly," meaning "many," and the word "ticks," meaning "blood sucking parasites."
-Larry Hardiman

The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.
-John Jay Chapman

The worst that can happen under monarchy is rule by a single imbecile, but democracy often means the rule by an assembly of three or four hundred imbeciles.
-Robert Anton Wilson

There are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party, and our country.
-John McCain

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.
-Alan Clark

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

There are worse things than losing an election; the worst thing is to lose one's convictions and not tell the people the truth.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten.
-Indira Gandhi

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-Isaac Asimov

There is but one way for a newspaperman to look at a politician and that is down.
-Frank H. Simonds

There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour.
-Benjamin Disraeli

There's a true schizophrenia where if you say to voters, you know, do you think the federal government spends too much money and they should spend less, they say yeah, absolutely. Then you name specific things, like Pell grants for students and they say, no, not that. How 'bout NIH, medical research funding? Nah, you really shouldn't cut that. And pretty soon you've proved that what the American public is against is arithmetic.
-Bill Gates

These days many politicians are demanding change. Just like homeless people.
-George Carlin

They'd [politicians] do the right thing, if they thought they could get away with it.
-A. Ernst Fitzgerald

Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint, and sometimes sounds distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas.
-Woodrow Wilson

Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't "stand for election", they "run for office."
-Jessica Mitford

Those against politics are in favor of the politics inflicted upon them.
-Bertolt Brecht

Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.
-Jean Jacques Rousseau

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.
-Bertrand Russell

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.
-William Penn

To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.
-Hubert H. Humphrey

Tolerance is an admirable intellectual gift, but it is worth little in politics.
-Woodrow Wilson

Too often in politics, there are fallacious either/or arguments put up as a justification or an excuse for an action or view which is skewed in such a way as too suggest that there is only one acceptable choice.
-Peter Garrett

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
-G.K. Chesterton

Truth is a habit of integrity, not a strategy of politics.
-George McGovern

Truth is not determined by majority vote.
-Doug Gwyn

Trying to take money out of politics is like trying to take jumping out of basketball.
-Bill Bradley

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-and both commonly succeed, and are right.
-H.L. Mencken

Under every stone lurks a politician.
-Aristophanes

Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.
-Noam Chomsky

Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing.
-Bernard Baruch

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
-Ambrose Bierce

Voters quickly forget what a man says.
-Richard M. Nixon

Voting is like driving... you choose "D" to move forwards and "R" to go backwards.
-Unattributed

We already know the winners of the next election. They'll be old white men who don't care about you or your problems.
-Craig Kilborn

We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.
-Buckminster Fuller

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. (in 1939)
-Louis Brandeis

We elect Democrats to the Congress to give us stuff and we elect Republicans to the White House so we don't have to pay for it.
-Charlie McDowell

We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.
-Martin L. Gross

We live under a republican form of government. We need forever to remember that representative government does represent. A careless, indifferent representative is the result of a careless, indifferent electorate. The people who start to elect a man to get what he can for his district will probably find they have elected a man who will get what he can for himself.
-Calvin Coolidge

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were.
-Gore Vidal

We'd all like to vote for the best man, but he's never a candidate.
-Frank McKinney (Kin) Hubbard

We're more than just politicians. We're more than just the cynical, venal, narrow, corrupt profession that all too often is a reflection of the current culture. We are in fact the inheritors and the lifeblood of freedom.
-Newt Gingrich

Well, sure, the government lies, and the newspapers lie. But in a democracy, they aren't the same lies.
-Alexis A. Gilliland

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
-Mohandas K. Ganhdi

What does an actor know about politics?
-Ronald Reagan

What is morally wrong cannot be politically right.
-William Gladstone

What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

What's real in politics is what the voters decide is real.
-Ben J. Wattenberg

When a politician changes his position it's sometimes hard to tell whether he has seen the light or felt the heat.
-Robert Fuoss

When a politician starts preaching, I tend to react the same way as when a preacher starts talking politics. I become very, very wary.
-Madeleine Albright

When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved.
-P.J. O'Rourke

When I die, I want to be buried in Chicago, so I can still be active in politics.
-Charlie Rangel

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.
-Jim Hightower

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
-Walter Lippmann

When political ammunition runs low, inevitably the rusty artillery of abuse is wheeled into action.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

When politicians complain that TV turns proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.
-Edward R. Murrow

When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them.
-Frank Herbert

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way.
-Frank Herbert

When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.
-Alston Chase

When you get into politics, you find that all your worst nightmares about it turn out to be true, and the people who are attracted to large concentrations of power are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from it as possible.
-Ken Livingstone

Whenever a fellow tells me he is bipartisan, I know he's going to vote against me.
-Harry S Truman

Why take a chance on a candidate who might lose? You can always buy them after the election.
-Santo Trafficante, Jr.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.
-Arthur Miller

Without faith we might relapse into scientific or rational thinking, which leads by a slippery slope toward constitutional democracy.
-Robert Anton Wilson

Years ago, fairy tales all began with "Once upon a time..." Now we know they all begin with "If I am elected."
-Carolyn Warner

Yet in all our rejoicing let us neither express, nor cherish, any harsh feeling towards any citizen who, by his vote, has differed with us. Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in the bonds of fraternal feeling.
-Abraham Lincoln

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
-G.K. Chesterton

You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to.
-Molly Ivins

You know I could run for governor but I'm basically a media creation. I've never done anything. I've worked for my dad. I worked in the oil business. But that's not the kind of profile you have to have to get elected to public office. (In 1989)
-George W. Bush

You know the one group I never criticize? Politicians. Politicians are put there by the public. Garbage in, garbage out. You get the leadership you deserve.
-George Carlin

You live in a democracy. You don't work in one.
-Douglas Dahlberg

You say we [reporters] are distracting from the business of government. Well, I hope so. Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.
-P.J. O'Rourke

You will never escape the will of the mob. About the best anyone has ever figured out to do is herd them into voting booths.
-Barry Shein


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