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Words of Wisdom - About Politics

  • These comments on politics are my favourites. Many of them make are a very sad indictment of tose who try to govern us. However when you ask CD-ROM Services to do your CD and DVD duplication, you can be sure that it will done efficiently, as promised. The only spin at CD-ROM Services are our discs!

  • Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet. -- Dave Barry

  • To be willing to die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture. -- Anatole France

  • Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. -- Gore Vidal

  • Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair. -- George Burns

  • War is not nice. -- Barbara Bush

  • Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies. -- W. L. George

  • Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm. -- John F. Kennedy

  • We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it. -- Dave Barry

  • We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language. -- Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, 1882

  • We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex--but Congress can. -- Cullen Hightower

  • We need a president who's fluent in at least one language. -- Buck Henry

  • When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of putting it into practice. -- Otto von Bismarck

  • When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. -- P. J. O'Rourke

  • When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home. -- Sir Winston Churchill

  • When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web.... Now even my cat has its own page. -- Bill Clinton, announcement of Next Generation Internet initiative, 1996

  • When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.' -- Theodore Roosevelt

  • When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion. -- C. P. Snow

  • Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining? -- George Wallace

  • With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another. -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  • You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public. -- Scott Adams, The Dilbert Future

  • You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature. -- George W. Bush, Speech on May 17, 2002

  • You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. -- Margaret Thatcher

  • You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too. -- John Kenneth Galbraith

  • Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office. -- David Broder

  • A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits. -- Woodrow Wilson

  • A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio address, Oct. 26, 1939

  • A diplomat... is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip. -- Caskie Stinnett, Out of the Red (1960)

  • A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. -- Sir Winston Churchill

  • A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them. -- P. J. O'Rourke

  • After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood. -- Fred Thompson, Speech before the Commonwealth Club of California

  • America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair. -- Arnold Toynbee

  • America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -- Oscar Wilde

  • Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States. -- J. Bartlett Brebner

  • Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies. -- Edgar Watson Howe

  • Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn't block traffic. -- Dan Rather

  • Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses. -- Unknown

  • Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

  • Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch. -- Orson Welles

  • Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy. -- Charles Peters

  • But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. -- Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Jean Baptiste Le Roy (1789)

  • Communism is like one big phone company. -- Lenny Bruce

  • Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. -- George Bernard Shaw

  • Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time. -- E. B. White, New Yorker, July 3, 1944

  • Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking. -- Clement Atlee

  • Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president. -- Johnny Carson

  • Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. -- Tom Robbins

  • Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody. -- Franklin P. Adams, Nods and Becks, 1944

  • Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. -- H. L. Mencken

  • Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. -- George Santayana, Life of Reason (1905) vol. 1, Introduction

  • For every action there is an equal and opposite government program. -- Bob Wells

  • Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians. -- Chester Bowles

  • Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine. -- Fran Lebowitz

  • History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. -- Edward Gibbon

  • History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. -- Abba Eban

  • How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese? -- Charles De Gaulle, in Les Mots du General , 1962

  • How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin. -- Ronald Reagan

  • I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. -- H. L. Mencken

  • I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty. -- Nancy Reagan

  • I do not know which makes a man more conservative-to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past. -- John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-faire (1926) Ch. 1

  • I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it. -- Thomas Jefferson

  • I have given two cousins to war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother. -- Artemus Ward

  • I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting. -- Ronald Reagan

  • I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this. -- Emo Phillips, Neuropsychology: Clinical and Experimental Foundations

  • Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows. -- David T. Wolf

  • If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates. -- Jay Leno

  • If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind. -- John Stuart Mill

  • If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate. -- Elbert Hubbard

  • If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read President Can't Swim . -- Lyndon B. Johnson

  • If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years. -- Bertrand Russell

  • In democracy it's your vote that counts; In feudalism it's your count that votes. -- Mogens Jallberg

  • In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying. -- Bertrand Russell

  • It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. -- Sir Winston Churchill

  • It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it. -- Henry Allen

  • It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember. -- Eugene McCarthy

  • Knowledge is power, if you know it about the right person. -- Ethel Mumford

  • Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made. -- Otto von Bismarck

  • Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side. -- Anonymous

  • Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him. -- Paul Eldridge

  • Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him. -- Paul Eldridge

  • Martyrdom... is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability. -- George Bernard Shaw, The Devil's Disciple (1901) act 3

  • More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. -- Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

  • My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes. -- Ronald Reagan, Said during a radio microphone test, 1984

  • No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit. -- Sir Frederick G. Banting

  • No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets. -- Edward Abbey

  • No. -- Amy Carter, (President Jimmy Carter's daughter) when asked by a reporter if she had any message for the children of America

  • Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source. -- Ron Nesen

  • Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. -- H. L. Mencken

  • Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate. -- Mark B. Cohen

  • Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature. -- Kin Hubbard

  • Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box. -- Italian Proverb

  • Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf. -- Lewis Mumford

  • Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. -- Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

  • Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles. -- George Jean Nathan

  • Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. -- Bertrand Russell

  • Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. -- David M. Ogilvy

  • Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. -- Arthur C. Clarke

  • Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies. -- Dalton Camp

  • Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. -- Ernest Benn

  • Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat. -- John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy, 1981-1987

  • Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come. -- Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (1936)

  • Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain

  • Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. -- Richard M. Nixon

  • The Army has carried the American ... ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability. -- Tom Lehrer

  • The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away. -- Ronald Reagan

  • The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself. -- John Ciardi

  • The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. -- Lord Acton, Letter to Mary Gladstone, 1881

  • The entire economy of the Western world is built on things that cause cancer. -- From the 1985 movie Bliss

  • The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it. -- Abbie Hoffman

  • The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level. -- Norman Mailer

  • The government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. -- Ronald Reagan

  • The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling. -- Walter Goodman

  • The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer. -- Henry Kissinger, New York Times, Oct. 28, 1973

  • The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. -- H. L. Mencken

  • The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too. -- Oscar Levant

  • The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it. -- Glaser and Way

  • The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth. -- Edith Sitwell

  • The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. -- Thomas Jefferson

  • The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth. -- Charles Luckman

  • The two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a big fat white guy who is threatened by change. -- Seth MacFarlane, The Family Guy

  • The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'. -- Larry Hardiman

  • There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. -- Richard Feynman

  • There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full. -- Henry Kissinger

  • There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Cold Turkey , In These Times, May 10, 2004

  • There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. -- John Adams, Journal, 1772

  • There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action. -- Bertrand Russell

  • There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity. -- Robertson Davies

  • There ought to be one day-- just one-- when there is open season on senators. -- Will Rogers

  • Think of what would happen to us in America if there were no humorists; life would be one long Congressional Record. -- Tom Masson

  • This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer. -- Will Rogers

  • Thomas Jefferson once said, 'We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.' And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying. -- Ronald Reagan

  • Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -- Voltaire

  • Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right. -- Arthur Schopenhauer

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