Politics

If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.

Plato
 

There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing.

Daniel Webster

 

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

Aristotle

 

A common danger unites even the bitterest enemies.

Aristotle
 

 

Samuel Adams

 

You can't get rich in politics unless you're a crook. 
Harry S. Truman

 

Those who believe that politics and religion do not mix, understand neither.

 

Albert Einstein

 

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Plato

 

If our nation is ever taken over, it will be taken over from within. 
James Madison

 

Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.

Winston Churchill

 

Every man is equally entitled to protection by law. But when the laws undertake to add... artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges—to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful— the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers, who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.

Andrew Jackson

 

When a government betrays the people by amassing too much power and becoming tyrannical, the people have no choice but to exercise their original right of self-defense — to fight the government. 
Alexander Hamilton

 

We need a revolution every 200 years, because all governments become stale and corrupt after 200 years.

Benjamin Franklin
 
If you want to be wrong then follow the masses. 
Socrates

 

Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem. ... Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it. ... The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much. 
By Ronald Reagan

 

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions, rather than their results. We all know a famous road that is paved with good intentions. The people who go around talking about their 'soft heart,'-I admire them for the softness of their heart, but very often it extends to their head as well. 
Milton Friedman

 

All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law

Theodore Roosevelt
 

Our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics.

Theodore Roosevelt
 

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

Winston Churchill
  

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

Henry David Thoreau
 

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell
 
The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a "Ponzi" scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today's young to pay today's old and counted on tomorrow's young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end. 
By Milton Friedman
 

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

Ayn Rand
 
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money.
Margaret Thatcher
 

I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Lime Kiln LakeLime Kiln Lake

 

Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier.

I will not allow my life's light to be determined by the darkness around me.

Sojourner Truth

 

I feel safe even in the midst of my enemies; for the truth is powerful and will prevail.

Sojourner Truth

 

When I left the house of bondage I left everything behind. I wasn't going to keep nothing of Egypt on me, an' so I went to the Lord an' asked him to give me a new name. And he gave me Sojourner because I was to travel up and down the land showing the people their sins and bein' a sign unto them. I told the Lord I wanted two names 'cause everybody else had two, and the Lord gave me Truth, because I was to declare the truth to the people.

Sojourner Truth