"Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases."
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Political quotes
Political
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Political quotes (page 52 of 356)
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"The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom."
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"I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."
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"I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent."
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"I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe, that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction."
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"I am for free commerce with all nations; political connection with none; and little or no diplomatic establishment"
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"The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint."
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"Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity."
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"Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good."
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"For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured."
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"The danger of loss of faith in God is not that one will believe in nothing, but rather that one will believe in anything."
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"The diseased pride [of artistic individualists] was not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe."
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"Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on."
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"What's wrong with "the new elite?" Forget cultural insularity or smugness. The main problem with the "new elite" is that they're not an elite at all. That is, they aren't particularly smart, or competent."
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"Candidates don't have to deal with reality. They talk about the wonderful things they can accomplish as if advocating them is the same as achieving them. They live in a world of political make-believe in which everything from reconciling conflicting interests to paying for costly programs is easy."
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"It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars."
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"Take the US. Women were not even able to vote until 90 ago, at about the same time they gained the right in Afghanistan. Rights of former slaves were very limited until the 1960s, and in some ways still are. In these and other domains there has been progress in democracy, though still seriously flawed. In other dimensions - the control of concentrated wealth over the political process, for example, things have gotten much worse in recent years. And there is much more, in both directions."
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"We don't have polls from the business world, but it's pretty clear that the energy corporations in America would be quite happy to be given authorization to go back into Iran instead of leaving all that to their rivals. But the state won't allow it. And it is setting up confrontations right now, very explicitly. Part of the reason is strategic, geo-political, economic, but part of the reason is the mafia complex. They have to be punished for disobeying us."
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"Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity."
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"As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman."
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