YourDictionary

Dictionary Home » Famous Quotes » political

political quotes

  • Diplomatic problems used to be discussed by ambassadors† Foreign Ministers were called†somebody thought of the summit meetings† Wearenearing themoment whenpolitical meetingswill be held at a divine level.

    - Dean Gooderham Acheson
      Comment to reporters in Florence, Sep. Recalled in This Vast External Realm (1973).

  • Twelve drawers full of political cancer.

    -Anonymous
    FBI agent referring to the files of J Edgar Hoover. Quoted in Newsweek, 23 Sep.

  • Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and for thepurpose of making mana political animal she has endowed him alone among the animals with the power of reasoned speech.

    -Aristotle
    c.330  BC  Politics, bk.1, ch.2,1253b (translated by T  A Sinclair).

  • Political economy tracesinanabstract way theeffects of the desire to be rich; and nations must nowadays abound in that passion if theyare to have much poweror respect in the world.

    -Walter Bagehot
      'Preliminaries of Political Economy', collected in Economic Studies (1880).

  •    It is a bad sign when Christians are frightened by 'political'sermonsas if Christian preaching could be anything but political.

    - Karl Barth
      Gegen den Strom (translated by E M Delacourt and S Godwin as'The Christian Community and the Civil Community' in  Against the Stream,1954).

  • Tearsmay be intellectual, but theycan never be political. They save no man from being shot, no child from being thrown alive into the furnace.

    - Saul Bellow
      The Dean's December, ch.12.

  • I was a man lucky enough to have discovered a political theory, a man who was caught up in the whirlpool of Cuba's political crisis long before becoming a fully- fledged communist. Discovering Marxism was like finding a map in a forest.

    - Fidel Castro (Ruz)
    Speech, Chile,18 Nov.

  • Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by whichthey have once won office.

    -John Kenneth Galbraith
      The Affluent Society.

  • It is upon those who say that it is necessary to exclude forty-nine fiftieths of the working classes [from the vote] toshowcause, and Iventuretosay that every manwho is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger, is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.

    -W(illiam) E(wart) Gladstone
      House of Commons,11 May.

  • Conservatives donot believethatthepolitical struggle is the most important thing in life† The simplest of them prefer fox-hunting, the wisest religion.

    - Quintin (McGarel) Hogg, 2nd Viscount Hailsham
      The Case for Conservatism, pt.1.

  • To model our political systems upon speculations of lasting tranquillity is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.

    - Alexander Hamilton
    ^8  The Federalist Papers.

  • Political genius consists in identifying oneself with a principle.

    - Simon Heffer
    Constitution of Germany.

  • I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago cameto the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

    - Lillian Florence Hellman
      Letter to  John S  Wood,19 May, on being asked to give information for the McCarthy trials. Collected in US Congress Committee Hearing on Un- American  Activities (1952), pt.8.

  •   There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble, and the economic ones are incomprehensible.

    - Baron Douglas-Home
      Speech,  Jan.

  •    Idealism isthe noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

    - Aldous Leonard Huxley
    Quoted in his NewYork Herald Tribune obituary, 24 Nov1963.

  • The great modern corporations are so similar to independent or semi-independent states of the past that they can only be fully understood in terms of political or constitutional history, and management can only be properly studied as a branch of government.

    - SirAntony Rupert Jay
      Management and Machiavelli.

  • If theTreasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury themat suitable depthsindisusedcoalmineswhich are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again†there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, thereal income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably becomea good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but as there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

    -John Maynard, 1st Baron Keynes (of Tilton)
      The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

  • Stevenson's convictions were sometimes too complex for the binary political arena to which he devoted his life.

    - Christopher Charles Herbert Lehmann-Haupt
      In the NewYork Times, 31  Jul.

  • The businessman dealing with a large political question is reallya painfulsight.It doesseemtomethat businessmen, with a fewexceptions, are worse when theycometo deal with politics than men of any other class.

    - Henry Cabot Lodge
      Letter to Theodore Roosevelt, 20 Oct.

  • The most striking of all the impressions that I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of African national consciousness. In different places it may take different forms, but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent.Whether we like it or not, the growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

    -Stockton
      Speech to the South  African Parliament, 3 Feb.

  • We had a two-track approach, one political and the other military, and the military was designed to move us along the political track.

    - Robert Strange McNamara
    On the Vietnam War in late1967. Quoted in Deborah Shapley Promise and Power (1993).

  • Margaret has been at her happiest confronting political dragons: I chose consensus.

    -John Major
      On the difference between his approach to politics and that of Margaret  Thatcher. In The Autobiography.

  • We are not a political party.We have not changed at all. On the contrary, the ANC is a Government in waiting.

    - Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
      Interviewed for BBC  T V, Feb.

  • Das Seelische [ist] immer das Prim a« re und eigentlich Motivierende; die politischeAktion ist zweiterOrdnung, Reflex, Ausdruck, Instrument. The mental state is always the primaryand ultimately the motivating state.Political actionis ofsecond rank, reflex, expression, instrument.

    -Thomas Mann
      Doktor Faustus.

  • We must not regard political consequences, however formidable they may be. If rebellion was the certain consequence, we are bound to say,'Justitia fiat, ruat coelum' (Let Justice be done, though the skies may fall).' See Ferdinand I 320:1.

    -William Murray, 1st Earl Mansfield
       Judgement against the sentence imposed on  John Wilkes for publishing the anti-ministerial political newspaper North Briton, 28  Apr.

  •    Every Communist must grasp the truth that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

    -Mao Zedong or MaoTse-tung
      'Problems of  War and Strategy', speech, 6 Nov.

  • Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. The purpose shall be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

    - George C(atlett) Marshall
      Speech at Harvard, 5  Jun, announcing the European Recovery Plan (ER A) that became known as the Marshall Plan.

  •    Assume a particular state of development in the productive facilities of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organisation of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society. Assume a particular civil societyand you will get particular political conditions which are only the official expression of civil society.

    - Karl Heinrich Marx
      Letter to P  V Annenkov, 26 Dec.

  • Political economy thus does not recognize the unoccupied worker, the working man so far as he is outside this work relationship. Swindlers, thieves, beggars, the unemployed, the starving, poverty- stricken and criminal working man, are figures which do not exist for political economy, but only for other eyes; fordoctors, judges,grave-diggers,beadles,etc.Theyare ghostly figures outsidethe domain of political economy.

    - Karl Heinrich Marx
      Collected in T B Bottomore (trans and ed) Early Writings (1964), p.137^9.

  • The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.

    - H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
      In the Baltimore Evening Sun, 9 Dec.

  • A third-rate political wheel-horse, with the face of a moving-picture actor, the intelligence of a respectable agricultural implement dealer, and the imagination of a lodge joiner†a benign blanka decent, harmless, laborious, hollow-headed mediocrity.

    - H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
    Of President  Warren G Harding. Quoted in Fred Hobson Mencken:  A Life (1994).

  • Welcome to Britain's New Political Order. No passion† No Right. No Left.Just multi-hued blancmange.

    - Austin Mitchell
      In the Observer,'Sayings of the Week',11  Apr.

  • Le divorce a ordinairement une grande utilite   politique;

    -Bre'  de et de

  • I have heard cynics who say he's a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes.

    - (Keith) Rupert Murdoch
      On the Dalai Lama. In the Daily  Telegraph,7 Sep.

  • When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

    - Robert M(aynard) Pirsig
      Zen and theArt of Motorcycle Maintenance, pt.2, ch.3.

  • The notion of a defence that will protect American cities is one that will not be achieved, but it is that goal that supplies the political magic in the President's vision.

    -James Schlesinger
      Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 6 Feb.

  • He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Undershaft speaking of Stephen. Major Barbara, act 3.

  • To state as clearly as may be what means lie readyto develop a property-owning democracy, to bring the industrial and economic status of the wage-earner abreast of his political and educational status, to make democracy stable and four-square.

    - (Archibald) Noel Skelton
      In The Spectator,19 May.

  • Everybody's got to reclaim these thingspoetry, rock'n'roll, political activismand it's got to be done over and over again. It's like eating: you can't say,'Oh, I ate yesterday'.You have to eat again.

    - Patti Smith
      In Rolling Stone , 27 May.

  •    A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.

    -Wallace Earle Stegner
      Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.

  • Whenpolitical ammunitionrunslow, inevitably therusty artillery of abuse is wheeled into action.

    - Adlai E(wing) Stevenson
      Speech, NewYork, 22 Sep.

  • It is exciting to have a real crisis onyour hands, when you have spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment.

    - Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness Thatcher
      Of the Falklands conflict. Speech to the Scottish Conservative Party Conference,14 May.

  • I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because†it meansthat they have not a single political argument left.

    - Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness Thatcher
      In the DailyTelegraph, 21 Mar.

  • La presse exerce encore un immense pouvoir en Ame  rique. Elle fait circuler la vie politique dans toutes les portions de ce vaste territoire. C'est elle dont l'½il toujours ouvert met sans cesse a'   nu les secrets ressorts de la politique, et force les hommes publics a'   venir tour a' tour compara|"tre devant le tribunal de l'opinion. C'est elle qui rallie les inte  re"  ts autour de certaines doctrines et formule le symbole des partis; c'est par elle que ceux-ci se parlent sans se voir, s'entendent sans e"  tre mis en contact. The presshas enormous power in America.It isthe press that circulates political life through all parts of this vast territory. Its eye is always open, and making known the secret springs of politics, thus forcing public men to appear before the tribunal of public opinion. It is the press which rallies the interests of the community round certain principles and forms the creed of different parties. Through the press these parties can speak to each other without seeing each other, can listenwithout meeting.

    - Alexis Charles Henri Cle  rel de Tocqueville
    ^40  De la De  mocratie en Ame  rique (Democracy in America), vol.1, pt.2, ch.3.

  • My political opinions lean more and more to anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)† The most improper job of any man is bossing other men.

    -J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) Tolkien
      Letter to ChristopherTolkien, 29 Apr.

  • It is the necessary nature of a political in this country to avoid, as long as it can be avoided, the consideration of any question which involves a great change† The best carriage horses are those which can most steadily hold back against the coach as it trundles down the hill.

    - Anthony Trollope
      Phineas Redux, ch.4.

  • I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Le  vi- Strauss inTristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference.

    - Pierre L van den Berghe
    'From the Popocatepetl to the Limpopo', collected in Bennett Berger (ed) Authors of their Own Lives (1990).

  •    I've climbed my last political mountain.

    - George Corley Wallace
      On retiring after being crippled in an assassination attempt. Quoted in the NewYorkTimes, 3 Apr1986.

  • In a political point of view, nothing can possiblyafford greater stability to a popular Government than the education of the people.

    - Samuel Whitbread
      House of Commons,19 Feb.

  • Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all itsthreatening evils, supplies atraining- school for making first-class men. It is life's gymnasium, not of good only, but of all.

    -Walt(er) Whitman
    DemocraticVistas.

  •    The party must protect itself against the activities of small groups of inflexible political persuasion†having in common only their arrogant dogmatism† I have no wish to lead a party of political zombies.

    - (James) Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx
      Labour Party Conference, 30 Sep.

  •    A constant effort to keep a party together, without sacrificing either principle or the essentials of basic strategy, is the very stuff of political leadership. Macmillan was canonized for it.

    - (James) Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx
      FinalTerm:The Labour Government1974^76.

  • The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted on the tested foundations of political liberty.

    - (Thomas) Woodrow Wilson
      Speech before a joint session of Congress, 2 Apr, to request a declaration that a state of war exists between Germany and the US.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Learn more about political

link/cite print suggestion box