Politician Quotes

Your arguments are overwhelming. You're obviously right — and the answer is No.

All human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!).

The nearest approach to immortality on earth is a government bureau.

James F. Byrnes

It has been thought, correctly and nicely, that everyone who is in peril will be helped. Practically this is implemented in the way that everyone who can say the word "asylum" is allowed to enter Europe and Finland, that word creates a subjective right to cross the border. Even for no proper reason, one gets a full investigation that lasts years, and if the preconditions for an asylum are not met, one can avoid coercive measures and thus stay in the country which he entered wrongly.

Sauli Niinistö

There was never a continent naturally so clean, and made so dirty, as Australia. There was not an animal pest, scarcely a vegetable pest; fools and the old world supplied them all.

Randolph Bedford

[China] should make foreign trade a channel for making adjustments in the home market so that it is improved. Light industry products and goods needed by the market should be imported.

In the last Parliament, the House of Commons had more MPs called John than all the women MPs put together.

Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't all have Brandeises, Cardozos and Frankfurters and stuff like that there.

The whole world is in revolt. Soon there will be only five Kings left—the King of England, the King of Spades, the King of Clubs, the King of Hearts and the King of Diamonds.

Generosity is part of my character, and I therefore hasten to assure this Government that I will never make an allegation of dishonesty against it wherever a simple explanation of stupidity will suffice.

Leslie Lever, Baron Lever

With certain limited exceptions, the laws of physical science are positive and absolute, both in their aggregate, and in their elements, — in their sum, and in their details; but the ascertainable laws of the science of life are approximative only, and not absolute.

Elisha Bartlett

The homosexual Tom Driberg complaining about his wife to his friends:

She broke her marriage vows; she tried to sleep with me.

The trumpets of the Beatles are not the trumpets of Jericho which will cause the walls of socialism to come tumbling down.

Władysław Machejek

I must needs say my judgement was for the Parliament, as the King's, and Kingdom's, great and safest Council.

While Paris gets to your heart, London to your mind, and Jerusalem to your soul, New York gets into your veins, a lifeline that becomes part of you more than you become part of it.

He gave himself diligently to mathematics, which he liked "vastly." "I believe they are useful," he writes, "and I am sure they are entertaining, which is alone enough to recommend them to me."

Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet

No man should live where he can hear his neighbor's dog bark.

Nathaniel Macon

Would that the Roman people had a single neck [to cut off their head].

We are talking about the biggest foreign policy mistake since Suez.

On the Iraq war

No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.

His [Warren Harding's] speeches left the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.

William G. McAdoo

The moonlight is the softest, in Kentucky,
Summer days come oftest, in Kentucky,
Friendship is the strongest,
Love's fires glow the longest,
Yet a wrong is always wrongest,
In Kentucky.

James Hillary Mulligan

The horse on the treadmill may be very discontented, but he is not disposed to tell his troubles, for he cannot stop to talk.

Nature is neutral. Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom.

Adlai Stevenson II

When General Glascock of Georgia was asked, upon taking his seat in Congress, if he would like to be introduced to Clay:

No, sir! I am his adversary, and choose not to subject myself to his fascination.

Thomas Glascock