Quotes
Quotes about Politics
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business.
In politics stupidity is not a handicap.
Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.
The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and hence clamorous to be led to safety] by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
Politics makes strange bed-fellows.
Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.
Politics, n: Poly "many" + tics "blood-sucking parasites".
In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.
The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.
I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit.
...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification. For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas. And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption.Vitality springs from diversity- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces- alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations.
Expecting a carjacker or rapist or drug pusher to care that his possession or use of a gun is unlawful is like expecting a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces. - "Usenet posting in talk.politics.guns".
To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your principles.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.
Intelligence has nothing to do with politics.
Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.
