American Politician Quotes

By common consent of the nations, gold and silver are the only true measure of value. They are the necessary regulators of trade. I have myself no more doubt that these metals were prepared by the Almighty for this very purpose, than I have that iron and coal were prepared for the purposes in which they are being used.

Peace, like war, can succeed only where there is a will to enforce it, and where there is available power to enforce it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

Theodore Roosevelt

Cut the Wings of your Hens and Hopes, lest they lead you a weary Dance after them.

Benjamin Franklin

If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.

Alan K. Simpson

There are too many books I haven't read, too many places I haven't seen, too many memories I haven't kept long enough.

As long as the sun rises over Ontario and sets over the Pacific, I will dedicate myself to bringing the people of Oregon what they want and need most - an era of hope, change, and economic renewal.

... Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't. Or when the Russians had aquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb - and yet still didn't have any stockpile of the weapons. That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.

The Bush National Security Strategy is the imperial edict of a superpower out to exploit its present supremacy to make itself permanent Lord Protector of the universe.

The people as a body cannot deliberate. Nevertheless, they will feel an irresistible impulse to act, and their resolutions will be dictated to them by their demagogues... and the violent men, who are the most forward to gratify those passions, will be their favorites. What is called the government of the people is in fact too often the arbitrary power of such men. Here, then, we have the faithful portrait of democracy.

Have we come to the point where it is now considered a secular blasphemy to acknowledge the name of God at all?

William J. Bennett

Let those who follow me continue to build with the plumb of honor, the level of truth, and the square of integrity, education, courtesy and mutuality.

More and more parents are coming to realize their children are suffering at the hands of a system built to strangle any reform, any innovation, or any change.... This realization is becoming more evident as the momentum builds for an education revolution.

Dave Barry:: Are you really Dick Armey?
Dick Armey:: Yes, I am Dick Armey. And if there is a dick army, Barney Frank would want to join up.

We can put cybersecurity first if we just make sure the next secretary of state doesn't have a private server.

The true touchstone of civil liberty is not that all men are equal but that every man has the right to be the equal of every other man – if he can.

Benjamin Butler (politician)

True consistency, that of the prudent and the wise, is to act in conformity with circumstances, and not to act always the same way under a change of circumstances.

John C. Calhoun

Has he paid his dues? Is he black enough? … John Lewis and I were out there marching and organizing sit-ins back in the '60s so that his children and my children would not have to do it. … We would have been failures if [Obama] had to do the same things we did.

Forty-one years ago that couple from Haiti could have made the choice to abort, but they didn't. They chose life. They didn't choose what might have been; they chose what is to come. They went and followed and fostered that life, and the future and the dreams that baby would bring

I am not elevating women to sainthood, nor am I suggesting that all women share the same views, or that all women are good and all men bad.

The measure of the wealth of a nation is indicated by the measure of its protection of its industry; the measure of the poverty of a nation is marked by the degree in which it neglects and abandons the care of its own industry, leaving it exposed to the action of foreign powers.

If a woman's got any instincts, she feels when her husband's off the reservation.

Clare Boothe Luce

No nation ever yet found any inconvenience from too close an inspection into the conduct of its officers, but many have been brought to ruin and reduced to slavery by suffering gradual impositions and abuses.

Edward Livingston

Bad news drives out good news. The irrational is more controversial than the rational. Concurrence can no longer compete with dissent. One minute of Eldridge Cleaver is worth ten minutes of Roy Wilkins. The labor crises settled at the negotiating table is nothing compared to the confrontation that results in a strike... normality has become the nemesis of network news.

Local defense will always be important. But there is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty land power of the Communist world. Local defense must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power.

John Foster Dulles