Great Throughts Treasury

"Conspicuous waste beyond the imagination of Thorstein Veblen has become the mark of American life. As a nation we find ourselves overbuilt, if not overhoused; overfed, although millions of poor people are undernourished; overtransported in overpowered cars; and also... overdefended or overdefensed."

"Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important."

"An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."

"As long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences."

"Broken things are powerful. Things about to break are stronger still. The last shot from the brittle bow is truest."

"Have you ever tried to split sawdust?"

"I can still smell the tear gas in the Hilton Hotel."

"I have left Act I, for involution and Act II. There, mired in complexity I cannot write Act III."

"I'm kind of an accidental instrument, really, through which I hope that the judgment and the will of this nation can be expressed."

"In 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others."

"In politics one may remain aloof and become irrelevant or get involved and get corrupted."

"It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember."

"Let us pick up again these lost strands and weave them again into the fabric of America, sort out the music from the sounds and again respond to the trumpet and the steady drum."

"McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled."

"Never say anything in a national campaign that anyone might remember."

"Nixon is the kind of guy who, if you were drowning twenty feet from shore, would throw you a fifteen-foot rope."

"No man could be equipped for the presidency if he has never been tempted by one of the seven cardinal sins."

"Now it is certain. There is no magic stone. No secret to be found. One must go with the mind's winnowed learning."

"One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics."

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies."

"Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life rafts."

"The glove has been thrown to the ground, the last choice of weapons made. A book for one thought. A poem for one line. A line for one word."

"The function of liberal Republicans is to shoot the wounded after the battle."

"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty"

"The maple tree that night without a wind or rain let go its leaves because its time had come."

"The Senate is the last primitive society in the world. We still worship the elders of the tribe and honor the territorial imperative."

"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency."

"This is, I say, the time for all good men not to go to the aid of their party, but to come to the aid of their country."

"There is only one thing to do — take it to the country!"

"We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it."

"The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life rafts."