Your Favorite Political Quotes

[goldcatt]

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx

 

[PLYMCO_PILGRIM]

"There is one transcendant advantage belonging to the province of the State governments... --I mean the ordinary administration of criminal and civil justice." --Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 17

"But as the plan of the convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, EXCLUSIVELY delegated to the United States." --Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 32

"The proposed Constitution, so far from implying an abolition of the State governments, makes them constituent parts of the national sovereignty, by allowing them a direct representation in the Senate, and leaves in their possession certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power. This fully corresponds, in every rational import of the terms, with the idea of a federal government." --Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 9

 

[manifold]

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.



- H.L. Mencken

 

[manifold]

More Mencken quotes about democracy...

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

 

[PLYMCO_PILGRIM]

Great quotes manifold.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years.

These nations have progressed through this sequence:
from bondage to spiritual faith
from spiritual faith to great courage
from courage to liberty
from liberty to abundance
from abundance to selfishness
from selfishness to complacency
from complacency to apathy
from apathy to dependency
from dependency back to bondage.

-- Alexander Fraser Tytler


Ah why did we set up a constitutional republic way back in our founding days again?

 

[PLYMCO_PILGRIM]

Everyone should read the federalist papers, its good stuff. -Plymco_Pilgrim

"But ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the State governments, would not excite the opposition of a single State, or of a few States only. They would be signals of general alarm... But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity." --James Madison, Federalist No. 46

 

[AquaAthena]

A politician's words reveals less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.--George Will

 

[PLYMCO_PILGRIM]

"[A] wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." --Thomas Jefferson

 

[Sky Dancer]

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

JFK

 

[PLYMCO_PILGRIM]

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

JFK

Translation "Stop Looking for Handouts from the Government"

"People unfit for freedom -- who cannot do much with it -- are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a 'have' type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a 'have not' type of self." -- Eric Hoffer

 

[PLYMCO_PILGRIM]

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience." - Albert Camus

 

[Sky Dancer]

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

JFK

Translation "Stop Looking for Handouts from the Government"

"People unfit for freedom -- who cannot do much with it -- are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a 'have' type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a 'have not' type of self." -- Eric Hoffer

I'd rather keep my own interpretation.

 

[JWBooth]

"...there have always been those who wish to enlarge the powers of the General Government. It has no power to raise a revenue or impose taxes except for the purposes enumerated in the Constitution....Every attempt to exercise power beyond these limits should be promptly and firmly opposed."


Andrew Jackson

 

[PLYMCO_PILGRIM]

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

JFK

Translation "Stop Looking for Handouts from the Government"

"People unfit for freedom -- who cannot do much with it -- are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a 'have' type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a 'have not' type of self." -- Eric Hoffer

I'd rather keep my own interpretation.

What do you think it means to not ask your country to do things for you but instead to do things for your country?

 

[JWBooth]

"...governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

United States Declaration of Independence​

 

[JWBooth]

“The Federal Government is no longer under the control of the people, but of a combination of active politicians, who are banded together under the name of Democrats and Whigs, and whose exclusive object is to obtain the control of the honors and emoluments of the Government. They have the control of the almost entire press of the country, and constitute a vast majority of Congress, and of all the functionaries of the Federal Government. With them a regard for principle, or this or that line of policy, is a mere pretext. They are perfectly indifferent to either, and their whole effort is to make up on both sides such issues as they may think for the time to be the most popular, regardless of truth or consequences.”


John C. Calhoun, 1849

 

[JWBooth]

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain, a Biography

 

[Sky Dancer]

Translation "Stop Looking for Handouts from the Government"

"People unfit for freedom -- who cannot do much with it -- are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a 'have' type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a 'have not' type of self." -- Eric Hoffer

I'd rather keep my own interpretation.

What do you think it means to not ask your country to do things for you but instead to do things for your country?

It means to be committed to service to others, it's not a comment about government handouts, corporate or otherwise.

 

[JWBooth]

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
H. L. Mencken

 

[JWBooth]

[FONT=&quot]Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]~Albert Einstein[/FONT]