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Voting quoting
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Published Tuesday, November 05, 2013 @ 5:47 AM EST
Nov 05 2013

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

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 fool and his money are soon elected.
-Kinky Friedman

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

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

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

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

An election is a bet on the future, not a popularity test of the past.
-James Reston

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

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 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

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 elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.
-George F. Will

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

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

Domestic policy can only lose elections. Foreign policy can kill us.
-John F. Kennedy

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

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

Finally, it occurs to me that the biggest problem with our elections is that however you vote, you wind up electing a politician.
-Burt Prelutsky

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

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

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

Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the 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

I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.
-P.D. James

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

I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

I have never had a vote, and I have raised hell all over this country. You don't need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!
-Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones)

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

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

If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained- then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people.
-Walter Lippmann

If elected, I will win.
-Pat Paulsen

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

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

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

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

If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing.
-Woodrow Wilson

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

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 any relatively close election you can generally credit almost any subgroup as providing the marginal votes.
-Duncan Black

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

In most places in the country, voting is looked upon as a right and a duty, but in Chicago it's a sport.
-Dick Gregory

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

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

In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes... it strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a national will emerges from the scattered, specialized, or indifferent blocs of voters who ordinarily elect the politicians. Those are for good or evil the great occasions in a nation's history.
-Walter Lippmann

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

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

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

Men may make laws to hinder and fetter the ballot, but men cannot make laws that will bind or retard the growth of manhood.
-Booker T. Washington

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-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

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

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

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

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)

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

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

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

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

The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
-Walter Lippmann

The first thing I'll do if elected is demand a recount.
-Kinky Friedman

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

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

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

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

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.
-Thomas Paine

The Senate is just what the mode of its election and the conditions of public life in this country make it.
-Woodrow Wilson

The universe is not rich enough to buy the vote of an honest man.
-Dick Gregory

There are two fundamental problems in American politics. The first is that most Americans do not believe that elected officials represent their interests. The second is that they are correct.
-John Gastil

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 is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong- deadly wrong- to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.
-Lyndon B. Johnson

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

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

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

Trickery is what humans are all about. They're so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.
-Terry Pratchett

Truth is not determined by majority vote.
-Doug Gwyn

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

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

Usually an elected official who has compromised to get nominated, compromised to get elected, and compromised repeatedly to stay in office.
-Dick Gregory

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 don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
-George F. Will

Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
-Russell Baker

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

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 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 country where voting rights get gutted but Sharknado gets a sequel.
-John Fugelsang

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 need to be asking for the vote in the most powerful way possible, which is to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we're asking for the vote from.
-Karl Rove

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

We're not going to have the America that we want until we elect leaders who are going to tell the truth- not most days, but every day.
-Ann Richards

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

When your opponent sets up a straw man, set it on fire and kick the cinders around the stage. Don't worry about losing the Strawperson-American community vote.
-James Lileks

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

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 have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.
-Guy de Maupassant

You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.
-Stephen Vizinczey

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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