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

What is happening and what may happen in the Nagorno-Karabakh and all the occupied lands is our internal affair. No international organization or country can interfere with our internal affair

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

How could we justify to the rest of the world imposing martial law on our capital?

When the Beijing Party Commission had proposed imposing martial law after the Tiananmen Square protests

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

Method is everything in archaeology, my boy. Why, we always deal with our finds in order.

Sir Joseph Scott, 1st Baronet

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.

Geology stands to engineering in the same relation as faith to works.... The success or failure of an undertaking depends largely upon the physical conditions which fall within the province of geology, and the "works" of the engineer should be based on the "faith" of the geologist.

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