Great Throughts Treasury

"What a man generally means when he says that he is not a politician I am afraid is this - that he has been all his life enjoying his political privileges and neglecting his political duties."

"Free and just political institutions are absolutely essential to the progress and development both of the individual and of the race."

"It is because politics, as I have already said, have been confounded with party politics; have often been contemptible and wicked beyond description; and, indeed, when not carried so far as that, there are a great many persons who positively cannot discuss politics without losing their temper. And this is so well known that the subject is tabooed to a very great extent in polite society, so-called, so that if you go to a dinner party the one thing of which you must not speak is politics, and the place that might reasonably be occupied by noble and instructive conversation about the science and art of life, and human progress, is occupied by inane, and worse than inane, gossip."

"Politics is the only serious subject that men think themselves qualified to act upon without any previous education or instruction whatever. If it happened to be astronomy, or botany, or medicine, or law, he would never be allowed to work in any of these arts, or to take a decisive part in the history of any one of these sciences without having, at least, acquired: the A B C of it; but the awful fact of politics is that we do not take the trouble seriously to understand the political situation."

"You cannot help being a politician. You cannot live for an hour without being a politician. But what a man generally means when he says that he is not a politician I am afraid is this--that he has been all his life enjoying his political privilege and grossly neglecting his political duties; and in that sense the observation is scarcely to his credit. As a matter of fact, politics, properly understood, is simply Science of Life--the doctrine of the way in which I am to do my duty to my neighbor, which is an essential part of true religion. It is nothing in the world except religion applied to human society; in fact, it is the practical recognition of the Second Table of the Law of God."