Politician Quotes

I have great respect for Dick Cheney. I don't agree with a lot of things he said in this campaign. He was a very distinguished Secretary of Defense, and I don't have anything negative to say about him.

Chicago has been characterized as the most segregated city in the United States, a city they said could never change.

Harold Washington

Over the postwar years, we have granted to the elite and secret police within our system vast new powers over the lives and liberties of the people. At the request of the trusted and respected heads of those forces, and their appeal to the necessities of national security, we have exempted those grants of power from due accounting and strict surveillance.

Let this sad tale of death never be told without a tear: let every parent tell the shameful story to his listening children, till tears of pity glisten in their eyes, or boiling passion shakes their tender frames.

The West-Lothian-West-Bromwich problem pinpoints a basic design fault in the steering of the devolutionary coach which will cause it to crash into the side of the road.

A Pack of Spanish Lies sent abroad in the world, first printed in the Spanish tongue, and translated out of the original. Now ripped up, unfolded and by just examination condemned, as containing false, corrupt and detestable wares worthy to be damned and burned.

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley

It is magnificent, but it is not war; it is madness.

In the early days our forefathers could cut down a forest or exhaust the fertility of a farm and then blithely move to a new forest or a new farm... The highest concept of statesmanship was to make it possible for the eager, aggressive pioneer to possess, to despoil and then repeat the process indefinitely....[Shortsided and unchecked greed resulted in] denuded forests, floods, droughts, a disappearing water table, erosion, a less stable and equable climate, a vanishing wildlife.

Harold L. Ickes

The telescope may be likened to a wondrous cyclopean eye, endued with superhuman power, by which the astronomer extends the reach of his vision to the further heavens, and surveys galaxies and universes compared with which the solar system is but an atom floating in the air.

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

First, there are good people out there; they just don't make so much of a racket. Second, if you don't make waves, then the bad guys don't get washed overboard. And third, nobody bothers to bad-mouth you unless they're afraid of you. So think of it as kind of a compliment.

The British had a poor record of retreating from colonies. There are more than ten years of transition period before our resumption of sovereignty. Will the British be irresponsible and "mess up" Hong Kong like comrade Deng Xiaoping said? We should be on guard. This is our major consideration for setting up the Joint Liaison Group. Surely, it will be beneficial for both countries, as other things may need to be settled by the two sides.

In a meeting with Xu Jiatun

We simply demand the practical recognition of the rights given us in the Constitution, and laws, and ask from our white fellow citizens only the consideration and fairness that we so willingly extend to them.

Abolitionism proposes to destroy the right and extinguish the principle of self-government for which our forefathers waged a seven years' bloody war, and upon which our system of free government is founded.

Stephen A. Douglas

I'd like them (Mainland Chinese) to live here (Kinmen) too. I hope someday they can buy property here and their children could come to school here.

I reject get-it-done, make-it-happen thinking. I want to slow things down so I understand others better.

We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam.

My mother is a great hunter — she usually shoots our Thanksgiving turkey.

Kirsten Gillibrand

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.

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.

We've got to remember that the people who first hit us in 9/11 entered this country through Canada.

Your eyes were filled with love, Kate Vane;
Ah, would that we were young again!

Thomas Dunn English

There is practically no figure whom the press would rather vilify than the wise virgin.

He thinks nothing more absurd than the common notion of Instruction, as if Science were to be poured into the Mind, like water into a cistern, that passively waits to receive all that comes.

James Harris (grammarian)

Every man is the architect of his own fortune.

Appius Claudius Caecus