Politician Quotes

[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.

Remember that Moses led his people through the desert for forty years, and that after twenty years people began to complain... they told Moses that life in the desert was too difficult, and that at least while they were slaves they had had food and water and places to sleep. Moses's friends asked him how long he thought people would be complaining like this, and he replied, "Until the last person born under slavery has died". Our situation is very similar. The psychological gap between eastern and western Germany will last for at least a generation, or perhaps until the last person born under Communism has passed away.

Lothar de Maizière

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

It is appropriate here to recall that the so-called Dark Ages began with the flight of the individuals into the protection of lords or chapters and came to an end when the individual again found it to his advantage to set forth on his own. We live at a time when everything conspires to push the individual into the fold.

Bertrand de Jouvenel

The Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marxism.

Morgan Phillips

Taipei is not only the nation's capital, but also the engine of its economy. Yet, in the past few years the city's economy has shrunk and has been surpassed by New Taipei City.

One of the guidelines which I have laid down throughout my chancellorship is no return to boom and bust.

No nation now sets forth to despoil another upon the avowed ground that it desires the spoils.

Statistics are like alienists — they will testify for either side.

Fiorello La Guardia

The dominion of the sea, as it is an ancient and undoubted right of the crown of England, so it is the best security of the land…The wooden walls are the best walls of this kingdom.

Wooden walls = ships

Thomas Coventry

We have dared to be free—let us continue free by ourselves, and for ourselves; let us imitate the growing child; his own strength breaks his leading-strings, which become useless and troublesome to him in his walk. What are the people who have fought us? What people would reap the fruits of our labors? And what a dishonorable absurdity, to conquer to be slaves!

Jean-Jacques Dessalines

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 cannot be a body of rules without a rationale, and this rationale constitutes the science.

George Cornewall Lewis

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

If a man has directed his course to great ends there is compensation even in ruin.

Arthur Lynch (politician)

Flora with a liberal hand has scattered around us, her charming productions, they every where meet and allure us, enchanting us by their beauty, regaling us by their fragrance, and interesting us as much by their subservience to our luxuries and comfort, as to the necessary support and well-being of our life.

If any man will draw up his case, and put his name at the foot of the first page, I will give him an immediate reply. Where he compels me to turn over the sheet, he must wait my leisure.

John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich

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

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

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

James F. Byrnes

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

Miracles happen. They have happened to me and they are happening to you. You need only look to the people in your lives in order to see them.

Of Adolf Hitler:

I, and many others who had interviews with him, were at first impressed by his sincerity, and later realized that he was sincere only in his belief that he was destined to rule the world.

Vernon Bartlett

If such a situation arises, that someone gains an advantage by waging war, that would be a bad example for small and weak nations. It is a shame for the entire international community, for the UN, international organisations and the superpowers that this can go on [referring to the Syrian Civil War. Of course public opinions need to be shaken up. We see demonstrations all the time about all kinds of things, but no one, nowhere has marched because of this.

Hair blows in the wind.
After years there is still wind.
Sadly no more hair.

Herman Van Rompuy

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