Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Ernest Hemingway
1. "We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart."
Hector Hugh Munro (Saki), "The Unbearable Bassington"
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
2. "Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great."
Clement Attlee
Other categories: History and Nations
3. "The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations."
David Friedman
Other categories: Peace and War -:- Power and Weakness
4. "Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy."
Mao Zedong
Other categories: Friendship and Hostility
5. "In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want."
C. Northcote Parkinson
6. "If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes."
Leon Trotsky, "My Life"
Other categories: Defeates and Mistakes
7. "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth."
Michael Kinsley
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
8. "Communism to me is one-third practice and two-thirds explanation."
Will Rogers, "Wit and Wisdom"
9. "All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."
John Arbuthnot
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
10. "Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory."
Salman Rushdie
Other categories: Art and Culture -:- Authority, Government
11. "It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in."
graffito, London, 70's
Other categories: Authority, Government
12. "Let’s not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea, just pie in the sky."
Boris Yeltsin
Other categories: Authority, Government
13. "Politics is the enemy of the imagination."
Ian McEwan
Other categories: Reality and Imagination
14. "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."
Hannah Arendt
15. "In politics you must always keep running with the pack. The moment that you falter and they sense that you are injured, the rest will turn on you like wolves."
R. A. Butler
16. "Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will."
Mikhail Bakunin
Other categories: Intellect, Judgement
17. "Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died."
Andrew Young
18. "My advice to any diplomat who wants to have a good press is to have two or three kids and a dog."
Carl Rowan
19. "The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous... Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead."
Harold Rosenberg, "The Tradition of the New"
Other categories: Art and Culture
20. "A liberal is a socialist with a wife and two children."
(?)
Other categories: Family and Loneliness
21. "Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart."
Yasir Arafat
Other categories: History and Nations
22. "Practical politics consists in ignoring facts."
Henry Brooks Adams
23. "The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead."
Kurt Vonnegut
Other categories: Success and Fame
24. "Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception."
George Orwell, "Collected Essays"
Other categories: Patriotism
25. "In politics, yesterday’s lie is attacked only to flatter today’s."
Jean Rostand, "The Substance of Man"
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
26. "An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle."
Walter Bagehot, "The English Constitution"
27. "Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power."
Aldous Huxley
Other categories: Power and Weakness
28. "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
John Adams, "The Works of John Adams"
Other categories: Authority, Government
29. "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy."
John Adams, "The Adams Family Correspondence"
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude -:- Peace and War
30. "Liberal — a power worshipper without power."
George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant"
Other categories: Power and Weakness
31. "Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy."
P.J. O`Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"
Other categories: Authority, Government
32. "Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us."
P.J. O`Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"
Other categories: Authority, Government
33. "Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as jokes."
Will Rogers
Other categories: Wit and Humor
34. "A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past."
Fidel Castro
Other categories: Authority, Government
35. "At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man walking into the little booth with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point."
Winston Churchill
Other categories: Authority, Government
36. "Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles."
Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
37. "Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything."
Frank Dane
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
38. "The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces."
Maureen Murphy
Other categories: Woman and Man
39. "Crime does not pay ... as well as politics."
Alfred E. Newman
Other categories: Law and Crime
40. "Politicians are the best alternative to warlords that we have yet conceived."
Stephen Covington
Other categories: Peace and War
41. "When a politician wrestles with his conscience, he usually wins."
Joseph Sobran
Other categories: Sin and Conscience
42. "Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation."
Kim Stanley Robinson, "Red Mars"
Other categories: History and Nations
43. "The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world."
Jimmy Carter
Other categories: Justice
44. "A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets."
Napoleon Bonaparte
Other categories: Peace and War
45. "International law is that law which the wicked do not obey and the righteous do not enforce."
Abba Eban
Other categories: Law and Crime
46. "Fish begins to stink at the head."
(?)
Other categories: Authority, Government
47. "Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet."
John Ralston Saul
48. "Fascism is capitalism plus murder."
Upton Sinclair
Other categories: Law and Crime
49. "In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, The Party can always find you!"
Yakov Smirnoff
50. "War is merely the continuation of policy by other means."
Carl von Clausewitz
Other categories: Peace and War
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
Layout based on template by Darren Hester, DesignsByDarren.com
