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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"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."
"Education remains the key to both economic and political empowerment."
"Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair."
"Mankind will never see an end of trouble until lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power become lovers of wisdom"
"The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property."
"All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical."
"We find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt ends -- the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it."
"The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so."
"To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."
"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."
"It doesnt hurt to repeat here the statement, still rejected by many people in spite of its obviousness, that education is a political act."
"Never complain and never explain."
"What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."
"A well informed public opinion is essential to the growth of political and social awareness. Only he who is informed can comment intelligently on his nation's development and only by such comments can errors be corrected and progress stimulated"
"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
"When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow."
"I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way."
"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."
"Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top."
"You have to know the past to understand the present."
