Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.
—Arthur Miller, 2001Quotes
The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
—Anthony Burgess, 1972In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong, 1938To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.
—Quintus Fabius Maximus, c. 203 BCI say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.
—H. Rap Brown, 1967I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967The 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, 1921Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.
—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917