Aesop

"The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms.
If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious.
If it injures the conscience it is criminal."

Henri Frederic Amiel, Source: Journal, 17 June 1852

"Under every stone lurks a politician."

Aristophanes, (450 BC - 385 BC)

Sir Ernest Benn

"American elections are a referendum on indifference. The remarkable dead-heat distribution of the one hundred million votes (in the 2000 presidential race) indicates how difficult it is to distinguish between the two parties."

Burt Blumert

"In the past few decades American institutions have struggled with the temptations of politics. Professions and academic disciplines that once possessed a life and structure of their own have steadily succumbed, in some cases almost entirely, to the belief that nothing matters beyond politically desirable results, however achieved. In this quest, politics invariably tries to dominate another discipline, to capture and use it for politics' own purposes, while the second subject--law, religion, literature, economics, science, journalism, or whatever--struggles to maintain its independence. But retaining a separate identity and integrity becomes increasingly difficult as more and more areas of our culture, including the life of the intellect, perhaps especially the life of the intellect, become politicized. It is coming to be denied that anything counts, not logic, not objectivity, not even intellectual honesty, that stands in the way of the 'correct' political outcome."

Robert Bork

Frank Dane

Colonel V. Doner, Chalcedon Report, 10/00

George Eliot

William Ewart Gladstone

Paul Greenberg

Andrew Grooms

Alexander Hamilton (writing as Publius in Federalist No. 1)

Mark Hanna

"Politics must be the battle of the principles --- the principle of liberty against the 
principle of force."

Auberon Herbert

"You cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political debate. You can only do it by following Lenin's injunction: 'In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent's argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.' "

Edward Langley

"The political terms 'will' and 'popular will' have a long track record in Western history going back to Rousseau. That record is profoundly anti-democratic, essentially inviting elites to interpret what the common people believe and want. In litigious modern America, that would be a judicial elite telling us how we meant to vote or should have voted."

John Leo

Norman Liebmann

James Madison

Groucho Marx

H.L. Mencken

"Half the sorrows of the world, I suppose, are caused by making false assumptions. ... (A great) increase (in human happiness) would follow if the American people could only rid themselves of (the) false assumption that still rides them - one that corrupts all their thinking about the great business of politics, and vastly augments their discontent and unhappiness - the assumption, that is, that politicians are divided into two classes, and that one of these classes is made up of good ones. (T)his assumption is almost universally held among us. Our whole politics, indeed, is based upon it, and has been based upon it since the earliest days. What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better? The former assumption, I believe, is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

H. L. Mencken from 'Politics', in 'The American Scene, A Reader' Knopf, 1965, p. 217-218

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

H. L. Mencken

"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."

H. L. Mencken

"Crime does not pay ... as well as politics."

Alfred E. Newman

"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you."

P.J. O'Rourke

"Politics should be limited in scope to war, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class."

P.J. O'Rourke

"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

P.J. O'Rourke

"The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm."

P.J. O'Rourke

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."

P.J. O'Rourke

Claiborne Pell

"The politicians in this world... have at their command weapons of mass destruction far more complex than their own thinking processes."

"Among the most urgent political priorities of our age is the separation of economy and state."

Lew Rockwell

Will Rogers

"The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office."

Will Rogers

"Nothing just happens in politics. If something happens you can be sure it was planned 
that way."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Politics and bureaucracy are arenas of personal power that are nearly irresistible to 
mediocre persons. Mediocrities in power regard the world as unsafe as long as persons of
originality and creativity are allowed freedom."

Otto Scott, Historian

Mark Twain

"Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly 
concern them."

Paul Valery

Dr. Walter Williams