Top 100 Great Political Quotes
#1. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#2. Architecture has its political Use; publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a Common-wealth ... Architecture aims at Eternity.
Christopher Wren
#3. ALEC is one great organization, I think, for growing future political leaders.
Don Nickles
#4. ...empires were formed by wars of conquest, but ruled by deception."
The Professor, Hope's great-uncle and the builder of the time-machine.
Eve Human
#5. To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, though merely such, is a great trust.
Edmund Burke
#6. One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected.
Theodore Dalrymple
#7. Greece has great strengths, but much of this potential has been wasted. That's because of a wider political system, but also because of a lack of an institutional framework.
George Papandreou
#8. There is only one hope for mankind - and that is democratic socialism. There is only one party in Great Britain which can do it - and that is the Labour Party.
Aneurin Bevan
#10. We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves - with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#11. My great desire has been to remove from the political arena a question of this kind that is calculated to prevent us getting a verdict upon the important political issues that separate the two parties in this country.
Charles Tupper
#12. On one side, citizens have great respect for the United States; they have a great feeling of friendship. That is solid. But in the opposition and in the political arena I often find criticism of the closeness of relations with the United States. That is a reality.
Vicente Fox
#13. The two great cultural and political currents of Italy have always only been concerned with the masses.
Emma Bonino
#14. We are a country with great potential. We have the political will to make deep changes in a just and equitable way, to put our country back on a development path, to meet the challenges of a new world.
George Papandreou
#15. 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.
Friedrich Engels
#16. Actors spend a great deal of their time making films. And that doesn't mean that they're not educated. But we haven't gone to law school and we're not experts on policy. We're just people with a platform and an opinion. But that should never be enough, in my opinion, to be political.
Angelina Jolie
#17. My father, one of the great entrepreneurs and philanthropists of this state, taught me that capital - monetary or political - is to be used to benefit others. I intend to continue that tradition.
Jon Huntsman Jr.
#18. One of the great virtues of Confucianism was its suppleness. Western political thought tended to be rather brittle; as soon as the state became corrupt, everything ceased to make sense. Confucianism always retained its equilibrium, like a cork that could float as well in spring water or raw sewage.
Neal Stephenson
#19. Modern invention has been a great leveler. A machine may operate far more quickly than a political or economic measure to abolish privilege and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance.
Ivor Brown
#20. I knew Hillary Clinton from undergraduate days and was enormously impressed with her. She was a terrific energy and enthusiasm, and a great organizer. And I knew that she was going to have a political future.
Robert Reich
#21. In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.
Andrzej Wajda
#22. In the beginning I thought, and still think, he did great good in giving support and encouragement to this movement. But I did not believe then, and have never believed since, that these ills can be settled by partisan political methods. They are moral and economic questions.
Ray Stannard Baker
#23. No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement.
Mao Zedong
#24. I still have a great deal of faith in our political system and a great deal of faith in the American people and voter.
Sharron Angle
#25. With a novelist's sense of drama and a historian's understanding of the social forces that shape our lives, Tom Gjelten has captured vividly
through the chronicle of a powerful family's fortunes
one of the great political dramas of our time.
Ronald Steel
#26. That politician who curries favor with the citizens and indulges them and fawns upon them and has a presentiment of their wishes, and is skillful in gratifying them, he is esteemed a great statesman.
Plato
#27. I wonder whether those of our political masters who have been put in charge of the defence of the country can distinguish a mortar from a motor; a gun from a howitzer; a guerrilla from a gorilla, although a great many resemble the latter.
Sam Manekshaw
#28. I think a lot of people see, obviously, the business side of my father. But, I mean, he's just a great guy. We enjoyed the holidays so much. To be able to spend time with him when he's not necessarily working or not doing the political thing, I mean, he's much more of a blue collar American.
Donald Trump Jr.
#29. Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.
Lester B. Pearson
#30. While in Israel, Mitt Romney said something every sane person knows to be true: There is great cultural and political meaning in the fact that Israel has prospered while the Palestinians have festered.
John Podhoretz
#31. Great upheavals produce shock waves that widen cracks in political, economic, and security orders. Sometimes the old orders break. Yet it can be in the power of leaders and peoples to shape the directions of change.
Robert Zoellick
#32. I had the vocation for politics. What I didn't have was any aptitude for political combat. I took the attacks personally, which is a great mistake. It's never personal: It's just business. It was ever thus.
Michael Ignatieff
#33. For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.
Michael Rostovtzeff
#34. As individuals, as families, as neighbors, as members of one community, people of all races and political views are usually decent, kind, compassionate. But in large corporations or governments, when great power accumulates in their hands, some become monsters even with good intentions.
Dean Koontz
#35. Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.
Lucy Parsons
#36. The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.
James Tobin
#37. To me, the Republican Party is the real great tragedy of the last 25 years because there are lot of good and decent people and a lot of good political points [that have] come from the Republican Party in the post-war period, but it has been hijacked by these fundamentalist wackos.
Alec Baldwin
#38. English experience indicates that when the two great political parties agree about something it is generally wrong.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#39. It is not so much freedom of speech but the right to truth that great men protect.
Criss Jami
#40. I'm not a political person. I'm a techie nerd, and I enjoy the techie part. I mean, all my life, I've loved great technology.
Vinod Khosla
#41. The great unexplored frontier is complexity ... I am convinced that the nations and people that master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century.
Heinz Pagels
#42. I sincerely hope that they (relations between India and Pakistan) will be friendly and cordial. We have a great deal to do ... and think that we can be of use to each other and to the world.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
#43. There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#44. To Donal Trump, making America great means making the people great. To the political cast, conversely, making America great means making government great.
Ilana Mercer
#45. which has the power or quality of adding. The additory fiction gives to a great man a larger share of reputation than belongs to him, to enable him to serve some good end or purpose.Arbuthnot'sArt of political Lying.
Samuel Johnson
#46. Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.
Herbert Marcuse
#47. The basic gamut of civil and political rights in terms of disappearances, detainees, people who are surrendered, what happened the missing. Any talk about allegations of war crimes. Those are the kind of thing that lead to a great deal of fear and uncertainty.
Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu
#48. Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes.
John Podhoretz
#49. While some who downplay Christ's divinity have imagined Jesus as a great social worker 'being kind to old ladies, small dogs and little children,' orthodox Christianity has not wanted Jesus to have a political message.
N. T. Wright
#50. I would say that my great political awakening was really born on Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the "Neither Victims nor Executioners" essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself. I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me.
Sam Hamill
#51. Within the United States, we have put great emphasis upon political freedoms. Because it has been our experience that these freedoms can lead to others.
Robert Kennedy
#52. From every ancient source, we have testimony to Cleopatra's irresistible charm, as Plutarch has it, to her ability to speak many languages including, as he puts it, the language of flattery and essentially, to be able to turn people to her will - really a great political genius, in that respect.
Stacy Schiff
#53. In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's a great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.
Simon Schama
#54. Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I'm telling my story as a political document.
Larry Kramer
#55. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition.
Peggy Noonan
#56. All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.
Moliere
#57. Religion may indeed inspire acts of great kindness and courage. But it also trains people to believe things for which there is no evidence. This makes religion's intrusion into the political sphere all the more troubling.
Ron Reagan
#58. It is from the power of taxation being in the hands of those who can throw so great a part of it from their own shoulders, that it has raged without a check.
Thomas Paine
#59. When I started making music, we'd lost a lot of our great people. Rock was moving in a direction I didn't like. Rock was my generation's revolutionary, sexual, poetic, and political voice, but it had become corporatized. It was going into stadiums. It was so far removed from its basic roots.
Patti Smith
#60. The great curse of modern political life is incrementalism.
Paul Keating
#61. Two kinds of men generally best succeed in political life; men of no principle, but of great talent; and men of no talent, but of one principle - that of obedience to their superiors.
Wendell Phillips
#62. The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done.
Honore De Balzac
#63. We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
William Butler Yeats
#64. An efficient and a successful administration manifests itself equally in small as in great matters.
Winston Churchill
#65. My parents never projected their dreams onto me. If they hoped I would be a great pitcher, or political figure, or artist (no chance), they never told me about it. Their view of parenting was to offer love and encourage me to chart my own path.
George W. Bush
#66. In both Israel and America, Jews have experienced unparalleled freedoms, achieved great economic success, and exercised appropriate degrees of political power.
Meir Soloveichik
#67. Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too.
Patti Smith
#68. When I was 5, my father was very much my hero. And he ran for political office in a very thankless campaign for a very thankless position. And he did it because his mother had instilled in him, if you are someone who has the capacity to make a great change, you have the responsibility.
Howard Warren Buffett
#69. Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation, but they pass far above and over the heads of the other half.
Wendell Phillips
#70. I did learn that some of the things that are great for locker rooms are inappropriate for political discourse. That's a wisdom I've garnered.
George Allen
#71. Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness. Courage therefore became the political virtue par excellence.
Hannah
#72. It's a great time to be doing political satire when the world is on a knife edge.
John Oliver
#73. The great political tragedy of our time is that conservative leaders in America have chosen to use their superior messaging and political skills to thwart serious action on global warming.
Joseph J. Romm
#74. We should try to ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to find a great life. It's a quest that will require political will and ingenious policies. President Obama's proposed expansion of the earned-income tax credit goes in this direction, but we need more.
Sendhil Mullainathan
#75. Dead. Supposedly Suicide. That's how they'll kill Michael too. Make it look like a suicide or an accident of some sort.
H.C. Deboard
#76. And this man, who had sailed round Europe and navigated the Great Northern Route, leaned happily over half a ladleful of thin oatmeal kasha, cooked entirely without fat - just oats and water.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#77. Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#78. It is the intense spirituality of India, and not any great political structure or social organisation that it has developed, that has enabled it to resist the ravages of time and the accidents of history.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
#79. Tonight was a great opportunity to take on the political status quo that has given us trillion dollar deficits and put millions out of work. Our objective was to inject some common sense into the conversation among Republicans at a time when business-as-usual simply won't work.
Gary Johnson
#80. "Some say the most beautiful thing in the world is a great cavalry riding down over the hill. Others say it's a vast infantry on the march. But I say the most beautiful thing is the beloved." How political can you get?
Sam Hamill
#81. I did it for political, moral reasons, thinking that I was making this great sacrifice, but it was absolutely necessary; I was not going to contribute to the violence in the world anymore.
Alicia Silverstone
#82. I find that the great majority of public servants across the entire political spectrum come because they believe in the United States and they want to change the world.
Condoleezza Rice
#83. In a world of unrest and fear, political turmoil and moral drift, I testify that Jesus is the Christ - that He is the living Bread and living Water - still, yet, and always the great Shield of safety in our lives.
Jeffrey R. Holland
#84. All the great political music was made at the height of political confrontations.
Billy Bragg
#85. Winning an award is a great feeling but winning the Vodafone Crossword Popular Choice Award is particularly exhilarating because it is based upon public voting. I find it a strange quirk of fate that Chanakya's Chant, a political tale, should end up winning an election!
Ashwin Sanghi
#86. In England pensions used to be given to aristocrats, because aristocrats had political influence, in order to corrupt them. Here pensions are given to the great democratic mass, because they have political power, to corrupt them.
William Graham Sumner
#87. There were so many great music and political scenes going on in the late '60s in Cambridge. The ratio of guys to girls at Harvard was four to one, so all of those things were playing in my mind.
Bonnie Raitt
#89. If the conditions were right there could be great acceptance. Often it is only when they pose an economic or political threat that it turns really ugly.
Iris Chang
#90. I've never seen a great military, political, or corporate leader who was not a great storyteller. Telling stories is a core competency in business, although it's one that we don't pay enough attention to.
Bran Ferren
#91. Have the colored people done anything to justify the prejudice against them that does exist in the hearts of so many white persons and, generally, of one great political party in this country? Have they done anything to justify it? No, sir.
Hiram Rhodes Revels
#92. You have to spend your political capital on great causes for your country.
Brian Mulroney
#93. For he who quells disorder by a very few signal examples will in the end be more merciful than he who from too great leniency permits things to take their course and so to result in rapine and bloodshed; for these hurt the whole State, whereas the severities of the Prince injure individuals only.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#94. This weekend the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, featured several speakers including Sarah Palin and Phil Robertson from 'Duck Dynasty.' It was a good weekend for conservatives - and a great weekend for wild animals.
Jimmy Fallon
#95. Manchester is a city which has witnessed a great many stirring episodes, especially of a political character. Generally speaking, its citizens have been liberal in their sentiments, defenders of free speech and liberty of opinion.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#96. A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
H.L. Mencken
#97. Everything is habit with men, everything even in their social and political relations. Habit is the great motive-power.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#98. Today we're seeing fundamental conflicts within political Islam, with the fundamentalists on the one side and the moderates on the other. Who gains the upper hand means a great deal to the world.
Zalmay Khalilzad
#99. The caliph Moauiyat asked Omr Ben Al-Aas the secret of his great political
skills: 'I never get involved in something without having first worked out my retreat; then again, I have never gone into a situation and immediately wanted to run straight out again,' came the answer.
Paulo Coelho
#100. That these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
Richard Henry Lee
