Politics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

One of the crucial problems we have as a party is that we have brought our leadership in from much too narrow a group. Basically Oxbridge graduates, in particular economics graduates, politics graduates, social scientists and lawyers. We need to reconnect to working-class communities, we have to reconnect to ethnic minority communities and bring up real leaders from within the people we represent.

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman

Things should be so fixed in government, that there should be neither degrading checks, nor alluring baits to the ministry. … In some of the states, the property of preachers is free from tax. In Virginia, their persons are exempt from bearing arms. Though this is an indulgence that I feel, yet it is not consistent with my theory of politics.

The center has shifted in our politics. I'm really at the center. And all the other candidates are to the right of me.

Dennis Kucinich

In many, many fields. I expected people in the social sciences-economics, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, politics, sociology, religion and numerous other areas to pick up on it. It's been somewhat of a mystery to me why even to this day, so few social scientists have discovered how useful it could be. Instead, Fuzzy Logic was first embraced by engineers and used in industrial process controls and in "smart" consumer products such as hand-held camcorders that cancel out jittering and microwaves that cook your food perfectly at the touch of a single button. I didn't expect it to play out this way back in 1965.

It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy.

Michael Ignatieff

If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.

Friedrich Schiller

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means... the need to be left. I am driven to grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.

These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let Society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax exemption is worth more than a Kim-berly or Comstock lode, since it does not require any labor, either mental or physical, for its exploitation.

Frederic C. Howe

Is this politics? I suppose I am going to have to learn all about it, if I am to run Lord Ferris's household, and throw parties and all. Now... explain to me again just who hates who, and why?

In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi.

John Mearsheimer

Politics is the art of making the people believe that they are in power, when in fact, they have none.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

War is a very rough game, but I think that politics is worse.

Bernard Montgomery

Well, politics is war, and in war, truth is the first casualty.

Jeff Greenfield

I would suggest that a feminism which does not also seek to alter the exploitation of poorer women is not feminism at all, but is simply a varient for of upper-class politics & self-privileging.

I think that politics needs a bit of spicing up.

In the Maritimes, politics is a disease, in Quebec a religion, in Ontario a business, on the Prairies a protest and in British Columbia entertainment.

Allan Fotheringham

I always had a kind of Myth of Cincinnatus idea about politics — that public service was something you do for a while in between stints at real life. And when your time is up, you return to the plow, which is hopefully still somewhere close to where you left it.

I never really had any a affinity for politics. I've always looked on politics as a means to an end... It has never been a natural part of my life.

Politics has been called the art of the possible, and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.

The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics.

Albert Schweitzer

The conventional model for explaining the uniqueness of American democracy is its division between executive, legislative, and judicial functions. It was the great contribution of Frank J. Goodnow to codify a less obvious, but no less profound element: the distinction between politics and policies, principles and operations. He showed how the United States went beyond a nation based on government by gentlemen and then one based on the spoils system brought about by the Jacksonian revolt against the Eastern Establishment, into a government that separated political officials from civil administrators.

Frank Johnson Goodnow

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the authentic print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

Walter Benjamin

Political philosophy seems often to reside at a distance from the world. Principles are one thing, politics another, and even our best efforts to 'live up' to our ideals typically founder on the gap between theory and practice. But if political philosophy is unrealizable in one sense, it is unavoidable in another. This is the sense in which philosophy inhabits the world from the start; our practices and institutions are embodiments of theory.... for all our uncertainties about ultimate questions of political philosophy — of justice and value and the nature of the good life — the one thing we know is that we live some answer all the time.

Michael J. Sandel

While I am a Hindu, Mir Mushtaq who is presiding over this meeting is a Muslim. Mr. Frank Anthony who has addressed you is a Christian. There are also Sikhs and Parsis here. The unique thing about our country is that we have Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis and people of all other religions. We have temples and mosques, gurdwaras and churches. But we do not bring all this into politics. This is the difference between India and Pakistan. Whereas Pakistan proclaims herself to be an Islamic State and uses religion as a political factor, we Indians have the freedom to follow whatever religion we may choose, and worship in any way we please. So far as politics is concerned, each of us is as much an Indian as the other.

Lal Bahadur Shastri

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Francis Fukuyama