Political quotes
7.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside political — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Ideologies - isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurence by deducing it from a single premise - are a very recent phenomenon ... Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of the ideologies discovered."
"I never perceived a contradiction in the political revolutionary field between the ideas I maintained and the idea of that symbol, that extraordinary figure who had been so familiar to me since I began to reason."
"To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity."
"Be sincere; be brief; be seated."
"I'm not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues."
"It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning."
"Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues."
"In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality."
"Above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority."
"The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force."
"Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change."
"Where you stand should not depend on where you sit."
"Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions."
"Matter as matter rather than matter as symbol is a conscious political position, essentially Marxist."
"Wanting to work is so rare a merit, that it should be encouraged."
"The Senate is the last primitive society in the world. We still worship the elders of the tribe and honor the territorial imperative."
"Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director and regulator, the standard of them all."
"Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement."
"There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey."
"A precedent embalms a principle."
