Politician Quotes

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.

Ideas that are at odds with the inherited collective wisdom of antiquity are always, on their face suspect.

Andrew Thomas (American politician)

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.

One must not be provoked when someone provokes him.

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

The present Colonial Secretary has been too clever by half [...] I believe he is a very fine bridge player. It is not considered immoral, or even bad form to outwit one's opponents at bridge. It almost seems to me as if the Colonial Secretary, when he abandoned the sphere of bridge for the sphere of politics, brought his bridge technique with him.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 5th Marquess of Salisbury

The greatest curse that can befall a free people, is civil war.

Alexander H. Stephens

Not thus HYPERBOLA; — with subtlest art The blue-eyed wanton plays her changeful part; Quick as her conjugated axes move Through every posture of luxurious love, Her supportive limbs with easiest grace expand....

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.

Time after time, on matters great and small, we are still standing on the sidelines, mutely accepting what is decided elsewhere instead of raising our voices and making our own choices. Scotland's much vaunted partnership of Jonah and the whale.

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

Kirsten Gillibrand

It's a great honour for me; it's such an important job.

The carrion crow, that loathsome beast,
Which cries against the rain.

George Gascoigne

I would like to ask a question. Would this sort of war or savage bombing which has taken place in Vietnam have been tolerated for so long, had the people been European?

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

To be told that mathematics is good training for the mind does not insure either the intelligent or ardent pursuit of this branch of science.

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

Culture is a more effective weapon than guns for the purpose of domination. For it was scientific, technical and technological culture which produced the guns. The prerequisite of any domination, exploitation and oppression is the denial to the oppressed man or people of his or their human attributes and therefore, in the first instance, cultural activities.

Ahmed Sékou Touré

The double jeopardy of being black and female in a racist and sexist society may well make one less afraid of the sanctions against success. A non-subservient black woman is by definition a transgressive- she is the ultimate outsider.

Mamphela Ramphele

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.

Natural dignity of mind or manners can never be concealed; it ever commands our respect: assumed dignity, or importance, excites our ridicule and contempt.

Joseph R. Bartlett

We don't know the path yet. But that's because we haven't blazed the trail. And I think you all know that I know a little bit about finding one's way through the dark.

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

This president is a miserable failure on foreign policy and on the economy and he's got to be replaced.

Good jests ought to bite like lambs, not dogs: they should cut, not wound.

Charles II of England