politics quotes

The Minnesota Board of Education voted to consider requiring all
students to do some “volunteer work” as a prerequisite to high school
graduation.
Senator Orrin Hatch said that "capital punishment is our society's
recognition of the sanctity of human life."
According to the tax bill signed by President Reagan on December 22,
1987, Don Tyson and his sister-in-law Barbara run a "family farm." Their
"farm" has 25,000 employees and grosses $1.7 billion a year. But as a "family
farm" they get tax breaks that save them $135 million a year.
Scott L. Pickard, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of
Public Works, calls them "ground-mounted confirmatory route markers." You
probably call them road signs, but then you don't work in a government agency.
It's not "elderly" or "senior citizens" anymore. Now it's "chrono-
logically experienced citizens."
According to the FAA, the propeller blade didn't break off, it was
just a case of "uncontained blade liberation."
-- Quarterly Review of Doublespeak (NCTE)

What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?
-- Bertold Brecht

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
-- Winston Churchill

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the
people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people
drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
-- Gore Vidal

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily
endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or
compassion.
-- Saul Alinsky

If we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it,
and involve others in our doom.
-- Samuel Adams

Nothing, nothing, nothing, no error, no crime is so absolutely repugnant
to God as everything which is official; and why? because the official is
so impersonal and therefore the deepest insult which can be offered to a
personality.
-- Soren Kierkegaard

If your hands are clean and your cause is just and your demands are
reasonable, at least it's a start.

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.
-- Andrew Young

There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.
-- Anatole France

The public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.
-- Thomas Carlyle

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice,
bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
-- Aristophanes

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.
-- Herbert Hoover

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from
the vexation of thinking.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1831

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government
working for you.
-- Will Rogers

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
-- William Pitt, 1783

If built in great numbers, motels will be used for nothing but illegal
purposes.
-- J. Edgar Hoover

How can you govern a nation which has 246 kinds of cheese?
-- Charles de Gaulle

A political man can have as his aim the realization of freedom,
but he has no means to realize it other than through violence.
-- Jean Paul Sartre

A diplomat's life consists of three things: protocol, Geritol, and alcohol.
-- Adlai Stevenson

Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying
as an income tax refund.
-- F. J. Raymond

I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing...
-- Thomas Jefferson

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough
to take it all away.
-- Barry Goldwater

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is
not hereditary.
-- Thomas Paine

It's a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it's a depression
when you lose yours.
-- Harry S. Truman

A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to
govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over expenditures
on armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins
itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and
manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.
-- Anatole France

I try to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brains fall out.
-- Judge Harold T. Stone

A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you
actually look forward to the trip.
-- Caskie Stinnett, "Out of the Red"

Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work ... I did not, when
a slave, understand the deep meanings of those rude, and apparently incoherent
songs. I was myself within the circle, so that I neither saw nor heard as
those without might see and hear. They told a tale which was then altogether
beyond my feeble comprehension: they were tones, loud, long and deep,
breathing the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest
anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God
for deliverance from chains.
-- Frederick Douglass

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but
won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
-- Bill Vaughan