Quotes · Skopia

256 quotes

A man who entertains in his mind any political doctrine, except as a means of improving the condition of his fellows, I regard as a political intriguer, a charlatan, and a conjuror.

Anthony Trollope

1883

★ 0.9

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.

Franklin P. Adams

1944

★ 0.9

Political literature

Surely of all 'rights of man,' this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.

Thomas Carlyle

1840

★ 1.0

Biography

Politics grease the wheels of business.

R.H. Tawney

1958

★ 1.0

Interview · TV program

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

Milton Friedman

1975

★ 1.0

Essay

In reality there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

David Foster Wallace

2000

★ 1.0

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Dissenting opinion · Legal writing

Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

John Paul Stevens

Bush v. Gore · 2000

★ 1.0

Essay · Magazine

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?

Susan Sontag

2001

★ 1.0

Speech · Commencement address

It's worth remembering this: freedom of expression sustains all the other freedoms we enjoy.

Ian McEwan

2015

★ 1.0

Speech · Political speech

I will govern according to the common weal, but not according to the common will.

James I

1621

★ 1.1

Treatise · Legal writing

In all tyrannical governments, the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and wherever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.

William Blackstone

Commentaries on the Laws of England · 1769

★ 1.1

Novel

Politics in the middle of things that concern the imagination are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert.

Stendhal

The Red and the Black · 1830

★ 1.1

Autobiography and memoir

We are here not because we are law-breakers. We are here in our efforts to become law-makers.

Emmeline Pankhurst

1914

★ 1.1

Economic literature

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

John Maynard Keynes

The Economic Consequences of the Peace · 1919

★ 1.1

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Vera Brittain

1964

★ 1.1

Nobel Prize Lecture · Speech

We are ready for the dialogue.

Lech Walesa

1983

★ 1.1

Speech · Political speech

And I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

Ronald Reagan

1989 Farewell Address · 1989

★ 1.1

Film · Animation (film) · Animation

Jessie's right! Authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from threat of force!

Barbie

Toy Story 3 · 2010

★ 1.1

Interview

We have to begin to have a conversation that incorporates a vision of love with a vision of outrage.

Ruby Sales

2016

★ 1.1

Essay · Political literature

Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments.

Alexander Hamilton

Federalist 1 · 1787

★ 1.2

Essay · Political literature

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results.

James Madison

Federalist 10 · 1787

★ 1.2

Essay · Political literature

Each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others.

James Madison

Federalist 51 · 1788

★ 1.2

Letter

The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labour.

Helen Keller

1911

★ 1.2

Essay · Newspaper

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

James Baldwin

1962

★ 1.2

Political debate

I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience.

Ronald Reagan

1984 Presidential Debates · 1984

★ 1.2

Speech · Political speech

Tolerance is the alpha and omega of a new world order.

Mikhail Gorbachev

1990

★ 1.2

TV program · Crime (TV) · Drama (TV) · Crime · Drama

You think I have time to ask a man why he givin' me money or where he gets his money from? I'll take any motherfucker's money if he givin' it away!

Clay Davis

2006

★ 1.2

Interview

Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible.

Angela Davis

2014

★ 1.2

Essay · Political literature

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

Henry David Thoreau

The Relation of the Individual to the State · 1848

★ 1.3

Nobel Prize Lecture · Speech

Our original guiding stars are struggle and hope.

Pablo Neruda

1971

★ 1.3

Interview

Do not wait for me to do something for your rights. It's your world and you can change it.

Malala Yousafzai

2013

★ 1.3

Novel

The chances are that a man cannot get into congress now without resorting to arts and means that should render him unfit to go there.

Mark Twain

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today · 1873

★ 1.3

Speech · Political speech

We are the change that we seek.

Barack Obama

2008

★ 1.3

Essay · Political literature

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

Michael Oakeshott

On Being Conservative · 1962

★ 1.7

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.

Enoch Powell

1977

★ 1.7

There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change-and it is for Mrs. Thatcher.

James Callaghan

1979

★ 1.7

Essay · Scientific literature

The priest persuades humble people to endure their hard lot; the politician urges them to rebel against it; and the scientist thinks of a method that does away with the hard lot altogether.

Max Perutz

1989

★ 1.7

Speech · Political speech

It is... Time to get back to basics: to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accepting responsibility for yourself and your family, and not shuffling it off on the state.

John Major

1993

★ 1.7

Obiturary · Newspaper

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.

Bernard Baruch

The New York Times

★ 1.7

Feminist literature

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

1918

★ 1.8

Legal opinion · Legal writing

Right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection. To many this is, and will always be, folly; but we have staked upon it our all.

Learned Hand

United States v. Associated Press · 1943

★ 1.8

We believe, and I think properly, that when the men who met in 1787 to make a Constitution made the best political document ever made, they did so very largely because they were great compromisers.

Learned Hand

1951

★ 1.8

Speech · Political speech

Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation.

Robert F. Kennedy

1966

★ 1.8

Pamphlet · Political literature

I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the wrong. They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do say, that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people.

Edmund Burke

1770

★ 1.9

Essay

I do really take it for an indisputable truth, and a truth that is one of the corner stones of political science—the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.

Jeremy Bentham

1797

★ 1.9

Essay · Political literature

Anarchism, then, really, stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraints of government.

Emma Goldman

1910

★ 1.9

Political literature

Never lose your temper with the Press or the public is a major rule of political life.

Christabel Pankhurst

1959

★ 1.9

Essay

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

A.J. Liebling

The Wayward Press · 1960

★ 1.9

Essay · Political literature

Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

Barbara Ehrenreich

1990

★ 1.9

Speech · Political speech

We are not the masters. The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people... What the electorate gives, the electorate can take away.

Tony Blair

1997

★ 1.9

Film · Crime (film) · Drama (film) · Crime · Drama

You know, when Khruschev was forced out, he sat down and he wrote two letters and gave them to his successor. He said, "When you get yourself into a situation you can't get out of, open the first letter, and you'll be safe. When you get yourself into another situation you can't get out of, open the second letter." Well, soon enough, this guy found himself in a tight place so you open the first letter which says blame everything on me. So he blamed the old man, it worked like a charm. When he got himself into a second situation he couldn't get out of, he opened the second letter. It said, "Sit down, and write two letters."

General Ralph Landry

Traffic · 2000

★ 1.9

Autobiography and memoir

You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then when you have the chance to do it better refuse to go near it.

Vaclav Havel

2007

★ 1.9

Letter

And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

Alcuin of York

800

★ 1.9

Poem

That politician tops his part, Who readily can lie with art.

John Gay

1732

★ 1.9

A known liar should be outlawed in a well-ordered government.

George Savile, Lord Halifax

1750

★ 1.9

Wherever a knave is not punished, an honest man is laughed at.

George Savile, Lord Halifax

1750

★ 1.9

Letter

The fundamental Article of my political Creed is, that Despotism, or unlimited Sovereignty, or absolute Power is the same in a Majority of a popular Assembly, and Aristocratical Counsel, an Oligarchical Junto and a Single Emperor.

John Adams

1813

★ 1.9

Economic literature · Political literature

No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust.

John Stuart Mill

1848

★ 1.9

Speech

Better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait till it begins to abolish itself from below.

Czar Alexander II of Russia

1856

★ 1.9

Lecture

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

Lord Acton

The History of Freedom in Antiquity · 1877

★ 1.9

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