on Politics

Rats live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
Wendell Berry

The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’, meaning ‘many, and the word ‘ticks’, meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’.
Larry Hardiman

If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.
Gov. George W. Bush (R-TX), President-Elect, December 18, 2000, quoted by CNN

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.
Jehanne D’Arc (Joan of Arc)

I think the most un-American thing you can say is, “You can’t say that.”
Garrison Keillor

… the Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.
Treaty of Tripoli (1797), Article 11, signed by President John Adams

If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president.
Ann Coulter, New York Observer, October 2, 2007

A child of five would understand this.  Send someone to fetch a child of five.
Groucho Marx

There are two important things in politics.  The first is money.  And I can’t remember what the second one is.
Marcus Alonzo Hanna, Senator (R-OH) (1837-1904)

Lashing our interests to the indiscriminate promotion of democracy is a tempting but unwarranted strategy, more a leap of faith than a sober calculation. There are other negative consequences as well. A broad and energetic promotion of democracy in other countries that will not enjoy our long-term and guiding presence may equate not to peace and stability but to revolution.
Henry Hyde, “Perils of the Golden Theory”, speech in Congress on February 26, 2006.

In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people.
Groucho Marx

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!
Ben Franklin

He declares his loyalty (and he can do no other if his declaration is to be accepted) in the only way the régime is capable of hearing; that is by accepting the prescribed Ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game.  In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.
Václav Havel, former president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic

There, where they burn books, they will in the end burn people.
Heinrich Heine, German poet, 1820, inscribed on a plaque at the site of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ book burnings

… Around the tribe, like twine that ties a package,… superstition wraps its concealing self.  Sometimes, one superstition will find it expedient to be polite to another.  As different as they often are, they have a common task, similar methods, an identical respect for hierarchy and its authority, frequently a text so sacred not even a comma can be cancelled, a love of mumbo-jumbo, pomp, and secret learning, a hatred of freedom, reason, and fact.  Their function is the preservation of the group; therefore they find ways to mark its members, to glorify the group’s past and promise it victory, to designate its enemies and vilify their qualities, to measure all such threats in order to exaggerate them, prescribe protective steps to remove the menace, and urge their prompt and ruthless undertaking…
William H. Gass, quoted in the St Louis Post-Dispatch on February 13, 1994

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent.  One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
John Kenneth Galbraith

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

There ought to be limits to freedom.
George W. Bush, Governor of Texas and US Presidential Candidate, in response to an unflattering website, 1999

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein

When the great lord passes, the wise peasant bows deeply and farts silently.
Ethiopian saying, quoted in Saving Paradise by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker (Beacon Press, 2008)

We need a president who’s fluent in at least one language.
Buck Henry, comedian, 1992

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Since the days of Greece and Rome when the word ‘citizen’ was a title of honor, we have often seen more emphasis put on the rights of citizenship than on its responsibilities. And today, as never before in the free world, responsibility is the greatest right of citizenship and service is the greatest of freedom’s privileges.
Robert F. Kennedy