Polity Quotes

#1. The right constitutions, three in number- kingship, aristocracy, and polity- and the deviations from these, likewise three in number - tyranny from kingship, oligarchy from aristocracy, democracy from polity.

Aristotle.

#2. Can any one be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and
brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite fifty-three years?

Polybius

#3. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals.

John Stuart Mill

#4. Corruption is an inevitable by-product of the present structure of Nigeria's federalism. Once we restructure the polity into a true fiscal federalism, everything else will simply fall into place. Until then, corruption remains as official as it is legal in Nigeria.

Tony Osborg

#5. Politics is rather the creation of the best possible polity out of the deep inner needs of its citizenry - who are only some of its members.

Mark Kingwell

#6. I am in favour of leaving people alone, however imperfect their polity may seem. It appears to me that you must not tell other nations how to set their house in order; nor must you compel them to be happy.

Patrick O'Brian

#7. The Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state.

Niall Ferguson

#8. Peoples nurtured on freedom and self-government judge any other form of polity to be deformed and unnatural. Those who are used to monarchy do the same .

Michel De Montaigne

#9. But Connecticut and Rhode Island have originally realized the most perfect polity as to a legislature.

Ezra Stiles

#10. For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights.

David Novak

#11. Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.

Annie Besant

#12. I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#13. The oligarchs think that the people are both dangerous and stupid. Their point is moot. But we do know that the oligarchs are a good deal more dangerous to the polity than the people at large.

Gore Vidal

#14. No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul.

Alexander Cockburn

#15. The very existence of society depends on the fact that every member of it tacitly admits he is not the exclusive possessor of himself, and that he admits the claim of the polity of which he forms a part, to act, to some extent, as his master.

Thomas Huxley

#16. It holds for good polity ever, to have that outwardly in vilest estimation, which inwardly is most dear to us.

Ben Jonson

#17. The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art.

Ralph Adams Cram

#18. Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn't have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.

Barney Frank

#19. True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Hannah Arendt

#20. Americanization means the process of becoming an American. It means civic incorporation, becoming a part of the polity - becoming one of us. But that does not mean conformity. We are more than a melting pot, we are a kaleidoscope, where every turn of history refracts new light on the old promise.

Barbara Jordan

#21. I've long believed that having multiple official languages makes it very hard to sustain a united polity.

Kevin Drum

#22. In a polity, each citizen is to possess his own arms, which are not supplied or owned by the state.

Aristotle.

#23. That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilization

Thomas Huxley

#24. [M]onarchy was, or ought to be, not so much absolute as mitigated by the principle of ius politicum, supporting a mixed polity partaking of elements both royal and political, which is to say, popular and representative.

Patrick Collinson

#25. It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'; that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government.

Walter Bagehot

#26. My life more civil is and free
Than any civil polity
Ye princes, keep your realms
And circumscribed power
Not wide as are my dreams
Nor rich as is this hour

Henry David Thoreau

#27. All the forms of civil polity have been tried by mankind, except one, and that seems to have been reserved in Providence to be realized in America.

Ezra Stiles

#28. It must never be forgotten that the general standard of learning and culture of a nation has a large part in determining its law and polity.

Theodore Plucknett

#29. I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.

Muhammad Iqbal

#30. Unity and secularism will be the motto of the government. We can't afford divisive polity in India.

Manmohan Singh

#31. During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.

David Novak

#32. Any society that entails the strengthening of the state apparatus by giving it unchecked control over the economy, and re-unites the polity and the economy, is an historical regression. In it there is no more future for the public, or for the freedoms it supported, than there was under feudalism.

Robert Higgs

#33. The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy.

Paul Wellstone

#34. If Polity forces were to turn up here, then your king would have to respond, by which time the turd trajectory would be fanwards.

Neal Asher

#35. He who intended to introduce a new law, should do it with a rope about his neck, in order that he might be immediately strangled, unless he could change the ancient constitution of the polity, to the very great advantage of the community.

Hierocles

#36. In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.

Zygmunt Bauman

#37. No form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#38. To his credit, Obama didn't just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something - to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America's deeply and historically individualist polity.

Charles Krauthammer

#39. No polity can be devised which shall perpetuate freedom among a people that are dead to honor and integrity. Liberty and virtue are twin sisters, and the best fabric in the world ...

James Henley Thornwell

#40. The little bee returns with evening's gloom, To join her comrades in the braided hive, Where, housed beside their might honey-comb, They dream their polity shall long survive.

Charles Tennyson Turner

#41. The First Amendment serves not only the needs of the polity but also those of the human spirit- a spirit that demands self-expression .

Thurgood Marshall

#42. How do you have a democratic empire, how do you have an imperial foreign policy built on a democracy polity. It's like some sort of strange mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know at the bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the world.

Mark Danner

#43. More than 90% of Chinese believe themselves to be Han. Of course, such a vast population is derived from countless different races, but because China has enjoyed such a long and continuous history as a polity, there has been thousands of years of mixing, melding and assimilation.

Martin Jacques

#44. Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?

Michel De Montaigne