Top 100 Great Political Quotes
#1. 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
#2. English experience indicates that when the two great political parties agree about something it is generally wrong.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. All the great political music was made at the height of political confrontations.
Billy Bragg
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. I can remember certain Manchester United defeats the way most people remember family bereavements or great political events. The four-nil drubbing by Barcelona, the failure to score against West Ham, the New Year's Day calamity at home to Spurs, the mauling by Middlesborough.
Tom Dunne
#14. If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.
Albert Camus
#16. This Republic was called into being, organized, and is upheld, by a great political doctrine.
Caleb Cushing
#17. I guess I just don't have the killer instinct that I think makes a great political cartoonist.
Bill Watterson
#18. All great political families have myths: stories they tell themselves about how history happened.
Peggy Noonan
#19. Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.
Carl Bernstein
#20. The human being is an unequal creature. That is a fact. And we start off with the proposition. All the great religions, all the great movements, all the great political ideology, say let us make the human being as equal as possible. In fact, he is not equal, never will be.
Lee Kuan Yew
#21. History shows us that the people who end up changing the world - the great political, social, scientific, technological, artistic, even sports revolutionaries - are always nuts, until they are right, and then they are geniuses.
John Eliot
#22. One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.
Adam Davidson
#23. Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side
Mark Twain
#24. The two great political parties of the nation have existed for the purpose, each in accordance with its own principles, of undertaking to serve the interests of the whole nation. Their members of the Congress are chosen with that great end in view.
Calvin Coolidge
#25. Foresight has been a distinguishing characteristic of all truly great political, religious, and social betterment leaders.
John Mott
#26. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#27. Al Gore seems to have found a great political ploy: Picking up whatever issue he is most vulnerable on and championing the cause. Perhaps he will start to champion perjury statutes and obstruction of justice.
Barbara Olson
#28. The great political problem in our modern democracy is how to induce our leaders to lead.
Edward L. Bernays
#29. The prime minister of Israel is welcome to speak in the United States, obviously. But we don't want to see this turned into some great political football
Benjamin Netanyahu
#30. We're in a political depression - a great political depression
Chuck Todd
#31. President Obama is one of the great political knife-fighters in modern history. He is a failed president - his economy is bleak, his foreign policy bleaker, his vision for American even bleaker still. But he wins.
Ben Shapiro
#32. I hold with Henry George, that at the back of every great social evil will be found a great political wrong.
Alfred Russel Wallace
#33. The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda against democracy.
Alex Carey
#34. I've noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I'm energized by listening to people's stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That's the work of an organizer.
Gloria Steinem
#35. What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it.
Timothy Snyder
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. ALEC is one great organization, I think, for growing future political leaders.
Don Nickles
#39. ...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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. The two great cultural and political currents of Italy have always only been concerned with the masses.
Emma Bonino
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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.
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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.
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.
James Tobin
#71. 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
#72. It is not so much freedom of speech but the right to truth that great men protect.
Criss Jami
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I'm telling my story as a political document.
Larry Kramer
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. The great curse of modern political life is incrementalism.
Paul Keating
#90. 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
#91. The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done.
Honore De Balzac
#92. 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
#93. An efficient and a successful administration manifests itself equally in small as in great matters.
Winston Churchill
#94. 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
#95. In both Israel and America, Jews have experienced unparalleled freedoms, achieved great economic success, and exercised appropriate degrees of political power.
Meir Soloveichik
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. It's a great time to be doing political satire when the world is on a knife edge.
John Oliver
