Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about politics

529 quotes from 258 people

Most readBy personPage 17 of 36

Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.
Ambrose Bierce1842–1914The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)
- Comedy
There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.
Isaac Asimov1920–1992I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), Chapter 130, “Foreign Travel” (p. 421)
If a Tory does not believe that private property is one of the main bulwarks of individual freedom, then he had better become a socialist and have done with it.
Margaret Thatcher1925–2013Article for Daily Telegraph (“My Kind of Tory Party”) (30 January 1975)
- Freedom
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
H. L. Mencken1880–1956A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
- Clever Jabs
Communism has sometimes succeeded as a scavenger, but never as a leader. It has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.
John F. Kennedy1917–1963Speech at NATO Headquarters, Naples Italy (2 July 1963)
A genuine man goes to the roots. To be a radical is no more than that: to go to the roots. He who does not see things in their depth should not call himself a radical.
José Martí1853–1895Martí: Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)
Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn’t got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got.
H. L. Mencken1880–1956A Little Book in C Major, New York, NY, John Lane Company (1916) p. 51
- Economics
Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob’s fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans.
H. L. Mencken1880–1956Notes on Democracy (1926)
The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.
John Maynard Keynes1883–1946The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), Chapter 24
- Economics
I’m getting sick and tired of people saying that this movement has been infiltrated by Communists. There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida.
Martin Luther King Jr.1929–1968Interview in Playboy (January 1965)
- Clever Jabs
A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory … From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
Winston Churchill1874–1965Speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri (5 March 1946)
- War & Peace
Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis. Conservatives have their place in the piping times of peace; but in emergencies only rugged issue men amount to much.
James A. Garfield1831–1881Statement of 1876, in The Diary of James A. Garfield: 1875-1877 (1983), edited by Harry James Brown and Frederick D. Williams. p. 396
I’m proud that I’m a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead 10 or 15 years.
Harry S. Truman1884–1972Impromptu remarks before the Reciprocity Club, Washington, D.C. (11 April 1958)
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
Hannah Arendt1906–1975Crises of the Republic (1969)
- Power
I hold the opinion firmly that Civil Disobedience is the purest type of constitutional agitation. Of course, it becomes degrading and despicable if its civil, i.e. non-violent character is a mere camouflage.
Mahatma Gandhi1869–1948Young India (15 December 1921)