Quotes About Politics And Government

“(Patrick) Henry rightly understood that the moral condition of the American people was a direct product of their religious faith, and that politics and morality were inevitably intertwined. Thus, the political structure ultimately rested on a religious foundation. The "great pillars of all government and of social life, "Henry once observed, are virtue, morality, and religion.”

— David J. Vaughan

“The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.”

— Jonah Goldberg

“Congress is going to meet with you or without you, I tell them. Don't turn away in disgust and leave those decisions to someone else. You don't like politics today? Grab the wheel of history and steer us to a better place. Run for office. Be a strategist or policy aide. Work for a government agency or a nonprofit. Become a thoughtful, probing journalist. Get in the arena. Help shape the world in which you're going to live. At a minimum, be the engaged citizen a healthy democracy demands.”

— David Axelrod

“The problems in every country are the same. Bureaucracy is strangling innovation. Overgrown political sectors are sucking away resources that could otherwise lead to growth. Regulations and taxes are punishing innovation. Public sector services are breaking down and no longer serving people's needs. Laws and prevailing legislation control a world that no longer exists. People who go into politics to change the system end up getting co-opted by it. Workers feel trapped and fear a lack out options outside the status quo. In every case, it comes down to the great evil of our time and all times: government itself. There is no place on earth in which more liberty and less or no government would not be welcome and bring about real progress.”

— Jeffrey Tucker

“Applying the 80:20 rule, I would say that 80 per cent of our youth don't even care about politics or government. What they care about are their lives-their jobs, their boyfriends or girlfriends and, well, that's about it.”

— Chetan Bhagat

“The electoral victories of Thatcher (1979) and Reagan (1980) are often viewed as a distinctive rupture in the politics of the postwar period. I understand them more as consolidations of what was already under way throughout much of the 1970s. The crisis of 1973-5 was in part born out of a confrontation with the accumulated rigidities of government policies and practices built up during the Fordist-Keynesian period. Keynesian policies had appeared inflationary as entitlements grew and fiscal capacities stagnated. Since it had always been part of the Fordist political consensus that redistributions should be funded out of growth, slackening growth inevitably meant trouble for the welfare state and the social wage.”

— David Harvey

“Religion forbids us from assuming a God-like character. This is especially true in politics and government, where limiting the power of the state, division of powers, and the doctrine of checks and balances are established in order to prevent accumulation of power that might lead to such Godly claims.”

— Abdolkarim Soroush

“Sectarian politics gets votes in Iraq. But sectarian government fails in Iraq.”

— Ahmed Chalabi

“To restore the American experiment in democratic self-government, religious believers need to redouble their civic efforts. For without our active participation in politics, the government will continue to trample on our rights. The Constitution does not prevent people of faith from being active in politics.”

— Edwin Meese

“Every person has only so much attention to give, and politics and government takes up only a fraction of what it did 25 years ago.”

— Robert Teeter

“I have two bookcases that used to be filled with cookbooks, but now it's mostly books about politics and government. I might just give this all up and run for office.”

— Graham Elliot

“The presidential candidates are offering prescriptions for everything from Iraq to healthcare, but listen closely. Their fixes are situational and incremental. Meanwhile, the underlying structural problems in American politics and government are systemic and prevent us from solving our most intractable challenges.”

— Larry J. Sabato

“First, take the government of the Indians out of politics; second, let the laws of the Indians be the same as those of the whites; third, give the Indian the ballot.”

— George Crook

“Both the fragmentation of power and the conflicting government policies are rooted in the political realities of a democratic system that operates by enacting detailed and specific legislation. Such a system tends to give undue political power to small groups that have highly concentrated interests, to give greater weight to obvious, direct, and immediate effects of government action than to possibly more important but concealed, indirect, and delayed effects, to set in motion a process that sacrifices the general interest to serve special interests, rather than the other way around. There is, as it were, an invisible hand in politics that operates in precisely the opposite direction to Adam Smith's invisible hand. Individuals who intend only to promote the general interest are led by the invisible political hand to promote a special interest that they had no intention to promote.”

— Milton Friedman

“Anyone who thinks that the vice-president can take a position independent of the president of his administration simply has no knowledge of politics or government. You are his choice in a political marriage, and he expects your absolute loyalty.”

— Hubert H. Humphrey

“But only 'rich' people by definition have the 'extra' money to buy things and invest to create economic growth. Do we really want to tax that 'extra' money away - and give it to the government to spend? Does that make any economic sense outside of politics and our emotional desire to make everyone suffer equally through these tough times?”

— Terry Savage

“Let's just do what is right for the American people. And those of us who are involved in politics and government know that our responsibility is to the American people, that we have a responsibility to find our common ground, to seek it and to find it.”

— Nancy Pelosi

“Hunting because of the 2004 Hunting Act. This is not a good advertisement for legislation. Yet, to appreciate the full force of the sham, recall, in wonder, the great ruptures between town and country, left and right, liberals and animal-welfare nuts, that preceded the ban. The march of 400,000 wax-jacketed pro-hunt protesters through London, the 700 hours of parliamentary debates devoted to the issue, the threat from Labour backbenchers to oppose all government business unless the ban was brought-it was madness. Even at the time, it seemed so: a dilettantish, illiberal, class-infused blot on what was otherwise a British golden age, for politics and the economy-as even the ban's reluctant main architect, Tony Blair, later admitted. A man not given to regrets, the then prime minister considered the ban one of his biggest. "God only knows," he reflected, what the point of it was.”

— Anonymous.

“Politics and government are certainly among the most important of practical human interests.”

— P.T. Barnum

“I don't know how you feel, but I'm pretty sick of church people. You know what they ought to do with churches? Tax them. If holy people are so interested in politics, government, and public policy, let them pay the price of admission like everybody else. The Catholic Church alone could wipe out the national debt if all you did was tax their real estate.”

— George Carlin

“These days when we speak of politics at all it is with indifference, anger, or "Please, could we talk about something that doesn't make us nauseous?" But there was a time when we could discuss government with hope, pride, and trust in our leaders, and that was when Corazon Aquino was president.”

— Jessica Zafra

“To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, rule of law and everything else enshrined in India's Constitution. Impossible to enjoy the animals otherwise. Long-term, bad politics is bad for business.”

— Yann Martel

“I got active in this business of politics and self-government in 1958 when my father, who was serving in the U.S. Army, took us to the battlefield of Verdun.”

— Newt Gingrich

“Scotland has been re-energized, and people all over the country have become involved in - and informed about - politics and government in a way that I have never known before. In short, we have put ourselves firmly in control of our country.”

— Nicola Sturgeon

“All I wanted was to be involved in politics and government.”

— Christine Quinn

“In government you carry each hope; each disillusion. And in politics it's always about the next challenge.”

— Tony Blair

“Politics and government have been a terrible place to invest; education has been a terrible place to invest, but that is because the entrenched interests make it a terrible place to invest. The way you invest in those sectors is you go against the entrenched interests; you try and disrupt the entrenched interests, not to service them.”

— Fred Wilson

“Equality is the heart and essence of democracy, freedom, and justice, equality of opportunity in industry, in labor unions, schools and colleges, government, politics, and before the law. There must be no dual standards of justice, no dual rights, privileges, duties, or responsibilities of citizenship. No dual forms of freedom.”

— A. Philip Randolph

“Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“From the starch-heavy 'food pyramid' to ethanol fuel, the government adopts programs not because they are right but because they gains votes, money or political power or solve problems that politics has already created, such as silos full of subsidized wheat or a shortage of gasoline due to the maze of controls on refining.”

— Robert Prechter

“People with an investment in government power will torture logic like a medieval inquisitor rather than face the facts ... There's a simple way to keep money out of politics: Keep politics out of our money.”

— Sheldon Richman

“Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary, reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else.”

— Bill Moyers

“The government transfers income and wealth according to the rules of politics, which make politicians the primary beneficiaries of the system, and the poor and needy the primary victims.”

— Hans F. Sennholz

“At bottom, the court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

— John Paul Stevens

“Our modern world of old story is completely failing humanity. This is the reason that increasing numbers of people have become and are becoming disillusioned from politics. People don't like voting. Whoever you vote, government gets in. Whatever they promise, they never fulfill.”

— Satish Kumar

“Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.”

— James Russell Lowell

“What I do care about is that it's an obstacle to other women entering politics, because they'll say, "Why would I do that? I have plenty of other options." And women with plenty of options are just the women that we want to be in politics and government.”

— Nancy Pelosi

“I'm cynical about society, politics, newspapers, government. But I'm not cynical about life, love, goodness, death. That's why I really don't want to be labeled a cynic.”

— John Lennon

“Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in.”

— P. J. O'Rourke

“If virtuous, the government need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting the truth, either in religion, law, or politics.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“The high-minded definition of politics is: 'the art or science of government; the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy.' It is only when you keep reading in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary that you get closer to the truth: 'political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices'.”

— Cal Thomas

“How odd that Americans, and not just their presidents, have come to think of their Constitution as something separable from the government it's supposed to constitute. In theory, it should be as binding on rulers as the laws of physics are on engineers who design bridges; in practice, its axioms have become mere options. Of course engineers don't have to take oaths to respect the law of gravity; reality gives them no choice. Politics, as we see, makes all human laws optional for politicians.”

— Joseph Sobran

“Mr. Vice President, the most fiscally conservative thing this government has ever done, is to invest massively in the green part of the recovery. Because those green dollars are the hardest working dollars in the history of American politics. That same dollar that is being used to cut energy bills, is also cutting global warming gas emissions, is also cutting unemployment, is also cutting poverty, through retrofits it's also raising the value of homes, is also by cleaning the air, cutting asthma rates.”

— Van Jones

“People who have been in and around government and politics their entire lives may not be able to see the truth. Our government must be fundamentally reformed. The system has to be changed. Our politics can no longer tinker on the edges.”

— Carly Fiorina

“I would say that the quality of each man's life is the full measure of that man's commitment of excellence and victory - whether it be football, whether it be business, whether it be politics or government or what have you.”

— Vince Lombardi

“In a word, if this country can steer clear of European politics, stand firm on its bottom, and be wise and temperate in its government, it bids fair to be one of the greatest and happiest nations in the world.”

— George Washington

“Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Politics is a fascinating game, because politics is government. It is the art of government.”

— Harry S. Truman

“I've said that we're going to produce real results for the American people because so many Americans feel left out and left behind, they think the economy has failed them, they think our government has failed, they can't stand the gridlock and dysfunction in our politics, and I'm determined to produce more good jobs with rising incomes, and deal with all of the concerns that families have about education, college affordability, student debt.”

— Hillary Clinton

“The word "politics" comes from the Greek politeia which had to do with the citizenry, not the government.”

— Marianne Williamson