POLITICAL/GENERAL QUOTES
Government should not be made an end in itself; it is a means only - a means to be
freely adapted to advance the best interests of the social organism. The State exists for the sake of Society, not society
for the sake of the State.
-Woodrow Wilson
The mere possession of intelligence and attainment
of high political office does not automatically instill in one the desire to provide for the common good of all citizens.
-Ray Gattavara
Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided: more
often it is a crisis invited.
-Henry Kissinger
The circumstances of the world are continually
changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as Government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living
only that have any right in it.
-Thomas Paine
To kill time, a committee meeting is the perfect
weapon.
-Fred Allen
It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible
processes of a huge and distant government.
-John Gardner
Example moves the world more than
doctrine.
-Henry Miller
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
-George Bernard Shaw
Statistics are no substitute for judgment.
-Henry Clay
The
level of dysfunction exhibited by any nation's political process is greatly influenced by the ethical and moral values observed
and practiced by society as a whole.
-Ray Gattavara
There may be times when we are powerless
to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
-Elie Wiesel
A
people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
There's none so blind as they that won't see.
-Jonathan Swift
Nearly all men can stand adversity,
but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
-Abraham Lincoln
Many people today
don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
-Louis Kronenberger
The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have
to catch up with it yourself.
-Benjamin Franklin
Be wary of the man who urges an action in
which he himself incurs no risk.
-Joaquin Setanti
The ideals of liberty cannot be fixed from
generation to generation; only its conception can be, the large image of what it is. Liberty fixed in unalterable law would
be[and is] no liberty at all.
-Woodrow Wilson
A man's[or woman's] intelligence does not increase
as he aquires power. What does increase is the difficulty in telling him so.
-D. Sutherland
Under democracy one party always devotes its energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both
commonly succeed and are right.
-H.L. Mencken
If liberty and equality, as is thought by some,
are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.
-Aristotle
Neither the clamor of the mob nor the voice of power will ever turn me by the breadth of a hair
from the course I made out for myself guided by such knowledge as I can obtain and controlled and directed by a solemn conviction
of right and duty.
-Robert La Follette
If everyone is thinking alike then someone isn't thinking.
-Gen. George S. Patton Jr.
Individual liberty and positive social evolution gradually erode within societies
that remain fixated on governmental structures that were never intended to last for all of eternity.
-Ray
Gattavara
Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.
-Samuel Johnson
An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.
-Thomas Jefferson
There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.
-John F. Kennedy
The final test of a leader is that he[or she] leaves behind him in other men the conviction
and the will to carry on.
-Walter Lippman
Truth is the only safe ground to stand on.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes
the duty of every individual to obey established government.
-George Washington
The supreme
reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet.
-John F. Kennedy
Government is at
best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
-Henry
David Thoreau
I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end...I have lost every
other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.
-Abraham
Lincoln
Creativity always dies a quick death in rooms that house conference tables.
-Bruce
Hershensohn
I believe in the color-blind society - but it has been and remains an aspiration.
-Thurgood Marshall
The nation behaves well if it treats its natural resources as assets, which it must turn
over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.
-Theodore Roosevelt
Without
freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as liberty without freedom of speech.
-Benjamin Franklin
There is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unkown to the world.
-Thomas Jefferson
Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor,
never the tormented.
-Elie Wiesel
Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail,
that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable.
-Thomas Jefferson
It is error alone which needs
the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
-Thomas Jefferson
A just society would
be one in which liberty for one person is constrained only by the demands created by equal liberty for another.
-Ivan Illich
No man is justified in doing evil on the grounds of expediency.
-Theodore Roosevelt
The law must be stable but it must not stand still.
-Roscoe Pound
A bill of rights is what
the people are entitled to against every government on earth.
-Thomas Jefferson
Simply exercising
power over others in a social and/or political environment does not equal greatness.
-Ray Gattavara
I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain (what I consider the most enviable of all titles) the
character of an "Honest Man."
-George Washington
I have never accepted what many
people have kindly said - namely, that I inspired a nation....It was the nation and the race dwelling round the globe that
had the lion's heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar. I also hope that I sometimes suggested to the lion
the right place to use his claws.
-Winston Churchill
Happiness depends on being free, and
freedom depends on being courageous.
-Thucydides
Politics is not the art of the possible.
It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-J.K. Galbraith
Magnanimity
in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.
-Edmund
Burke
These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable
and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a
mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the scriptural parable, the bland lead the bland.
-J.K.
Galbraith
Mankind has probably done more damage to the earth in the 20th century than in all of previous history.
-Jacques Cousteau
Let us teach ourselves and others that politics can be not only the art of the possible,
especially if this means the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals, and pragmatic maneuvering, but that
it can even be the art of the impossible, namely, the art of improving ourselves and the world.
-Vaclev Havel
It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.
-Walter Bagehot
The true character of a politician, and many others as well, is revealed more by his/her statements that prompt a quick
apology and/or explanation, rather than by routine comments made during the course of day-to-day activities.
-Ray Gattavara
Governments that apply complexity instead of simplicity to their domestic governing process
often do so in an attempt to conceal inaction, or dysfunction.
-Ray Gattavara
Just as a cautious
businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all
our happiness from one quarter alone.
-Sigmund Freud
A problem well stated is a problem half
solved.
-Charles F. Kettering
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without
any other reason but because they are not already common.
-John Locke
Be wary of the elected
public official or branch of government that spends any energies on partisan political issues, for its reflective of a dysfunctional
unwillingness to introduce or advance ideas that would foster much needed political and social evolution, and at the same
time reveals an intense interest on the part of politicians to create an illusion for the general populace that something
positive is being done when the opposite is true.
-Ray Gattavara
If Columbus had an advisory
committee he would probably still be at the dock.
-Arthur Goldberg
No man should be in politics
unless he would honestly rather not be there.
-Henry Adams
The redwoods, once seen, leave
a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree.
The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor
the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from
another time.
-John Steinbeck
Learn to expect more from your elected governmental representatives.
Deliberately ignore what they say, diligently watch what they do. You may discover that little or nothing is accomplished
that has the potential to restore common sense and hope for the future to our social fabric.
-Ray Gattavara
It is as much the duty of government to render prompt justice against itself, on favor of citizens, as it is
to administer the same between private individuals.
-Abraham Lincoln
