This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The essential ingredient of politics is timing." - Pierre Trudeau, aka Pierre Elliott Trudeau, fully Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato NULL
"Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of human affairs." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in education." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
"Responsibility educates, and politics is but another name for God’s way of teaching the masses ethics, under the responsibility of great present interests." - Wendell Phillips
"Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics." - Wendell Phillips
"Conservatism is the politics of reality." - William F. Buckley, Jr.
"He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery." - William Hazlitt
"The twin concepts of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians. " - Charles de Gaulle, fully Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle
"In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons [...] who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world." - Edward Bernays, fully Edward Louis Bernays
"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." - Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
"I know that theater people often have very simplistic view of politics and tend to express very black and white patriotic sentiments but perhaps that is because we know the value of illusion, how it can help strengthen the weak, and stimulate the weary" - Franco Zeffirelli
"Science, history and politics are not suited for discussion except by experts. Others are simply in the position of requiring more information; and, till they have acquired all available information, cannot do anything but accept on authority the opinions of those better qualified. " - Frank Plumpton Ramsey
"Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. " - Henry Adams, aka Henry Brooks Adams
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. " - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"To let politics become a cesspool, and then avoid it because it is a cesspool, is a double crime. " - Howard Crosby
"Love says respect the other as an end unto himself or herself; never use the other as a means. Nobody is a means for you, everybody is an end. But then ambition will flop, and our whole educational system depends on ambitiousness, our politics depends on ambition, our religions depend on ambition." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
"No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power. " - Jacob Bronowski
"All politics are based on the indifference of the majority." - James Barrett Reston, nicknamed "Scotty"
"Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique. " - James MacGregor Burns
"If you really care for freedom, liberty, There cannot be any democracy or liberal institution without politics. The only true antidote to the perversions of politics is more politics and better politics. Not negation of politics." - Jayaprakash Narayan, known as JP Narayan, Jayaprakash or Loknayak
"True politics is about promotion of human happiness." - Jayaprakash Narayan, known as JP Narayan, Jayaprakash or Loknayak
"As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance." - John Dewey
"There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through. " - John Gunther
"In politics you have no friends, only allies. " - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought. " - John Jay Chapman
"There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose. " - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." - John Quincy Adams
"Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. Our age is too enlightened to contend upon topics, which concern only the interests of eternity; and men who hold in proper contempt all controversies about trifles, except such as inflame their own passions, have made it a common-place censure against your ancestors, that their zeal was enkindled by subjects of trivial importance; and that however aggrieved by the intolerance of others, they were alike intolerant themselves." - John Quincy Adams
"Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation." - Julia Kristeva
"There is a wholly mistaken zeal in politics as well as in religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves." - Junius, psyeudonym of unknown English Political Writer NULL
"There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But… the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder… This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as its heroes." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means." - Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz
"Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality." - Karl Wilheim Friedrich Schlegel, later Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel
"It should be noted that people in the free market rarely bear false witness; integrity is the rule. The morning mile, phone calls, planes the airlines buy, autos by the millions – no one could list the instances – are as represented. We have daily, eloquent, enormous testimony that the Ten Commandments can be and are observed by fallible human beings. Contemporary politics is the most glaring of all exceptions." - Leonard E. Read
"A politician is a person with whose politics you don't agree; if you agree with him he's a statesman." - Lloyd George, fully David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor
"In politics the choice is constantly between two evils. " - John Morley, 1st Viscount Morely of Blackburn, Lord Morley
"Therefore it is not arrogance or narrowrnindedness that leads the economist to discuss these things from the standpoint of economics. No one, who is not able to form an independent opinion about the admittedly difficult and highly technical problem of calculation in the socialist economy, should take sides in the question of socialism versus capitalism. No one should speak about interventionism who has not examined the economic consequences of interventionism. An end should be put to the common practice of discussing these problems from the standpoint of the prevailing errors, fallacies, and prejudices. It might be more entertaining to avoid the real issues and merely to use popular catchwords and emotional slogans. But politics is a serious matter. Those who do not want to think its problems through to the end should keep away from it." - Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
"The pursuit of politics is religion, morality, and poetry all in one. " - Madame de Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, born Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Madame Necker
"Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed. " - Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
"Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger." - Mario Puzo, fully Mario Gianluigi Puzo
"Religion means goal and way, politics implies end and means. The political end is recognizable by the fact that it may be attained—in success—and its attainment is historically recorded. The religious goal remains, even in man's highest experiences, that which simply provides direction on the mortal way; it never enters into historical consummation." - Martin Buber
"I have never found in a long experience of politics that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance." - Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton
"The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope." - Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner