1. Politics

2. The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.     -- John Jay Chapman

3. A political career brings out the basest qualities in human nature.     -- Lord Bryce

4. A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.     -- J. F. Clarke

5. There is no such thing as a nonpolitical speech by a politician.     -- Richard M. Nixon

6. The political world is stimulating. It's the most interesting thing you can do. It beats following the dollar.     -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

7. 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

8. Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.     -- Charles de Gaulle

9. I'd rather keep my promises to other politicians than to God. God, at least, has a degree of forgiveness.     -- Anonymous Politician

10. I'm proud that I'm a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years.     -- Harry S. Truman

11. Politics makes strange bed-fellows.     -- Charles Dudley Warner

12. I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.     -- Socrates

13. He has been called a mediocre man; but this is unwarranted flattery. He was a politician of monumental littleness.     -- Theodore Roosevelt

14. Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.     -- Winston Churchill

15. Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.     -- Nikita Khrushchev

16. The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.     -- Reinhold Niebuhr

17. Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.     -- Ambrose Bierce

18. Politics is not an exact science.     -- Otto von Bismarck

19. The only way you can do that [decrease taxes, balance the budget, and increase military spending] is with mirrors, and that's what it would take.     -- John B. Anderson

20. Politics is a profession; a serious, complicated and, in its true sense, a noble one.     -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

21. Politics is the art of the possible.     -- Otto von Bismarck

22. Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.     -- Robert Louis Stevenson

23. Politics: (noun) From Greek, poly, meaning many, and ticks, meaning bloodsuckers.     -- Anon

24. 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

25. Government

26. Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed.     -- Bernhard Berenson

27. The government is becoming the family of last resort.     -- Jerry Brown

28. The nearest approach to immortality on earth is a government bureau.     -- James F. Byrnes

29. The point to remember is that what the Government gives it must first take away.     -- John Caldwell

30. In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.     -- Thomas Carlyle

31. He mocks the people who proposes that the government shall protect the rich that they in turn may care for the laboring poor.     -- Grover Cleveland

32. The American wage earner and the American housewife are a lot better economists than most economists care to admit. They know that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.     -- Gerald R. Ford

33. Good government is no substitute for self-government.     -- Mahatma Gandhi

34. All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.     -- James A. Garfield

35. Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.     -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

36. A goverment that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.     -- Barry Goldwater

37. A wise government knows how to enforce with temper, or to conciliate with dignity, but a weak one is odious in the former, and contemptible in the latter.     -- George Greenville

38. Far more important to me is, that I should be loyal to what I regard as the law of my political life, which is this: a belief that that country is best governed, which is least governed ...     -- George Hoadly

39. Government is a kind of legalized pillage.     -- Elbert Hubbard

40. That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves.     -- Thomas Jefferson

41. Doing what's right isn't the problem. It's knowing what's right.     -- Lyndon B. Johnson

42. My experience in government is that when things are non-controversial and beautifully coordinated, there is not much going on.     -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

43. You can't run a government solely on a business basis ... Government should be human. It should have a heart.     -- Herbert Henry Lehman

44. Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?     -- Abraham Lincoln

45. No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.     -- Abraham Lincoln

46. Every country has the government it deserves.     -- Joseph de Maistre

47. You have the God-given right to kick the government around--don't hesitate to do so.     -- Edmund Muske

48. The art of governing consists in not letting men grow old in their jobs.     -- Napoleon Bonaparte

49. Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.     -- William Penn

50. The punishment which the wise suffer, who refuse to take part in government, is to live under the government of worse men.     -- Plato

51. A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.     -- James Reston

52. Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.     -- Will Rogers

53. The government is us; we are the government, you and I.     -- Theodore Roosevelt

54. The true art of government consists in not governing too much.     -- Jonathan Shipley

55. Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.     -- Adlai E. Stevenson

56. Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.     -- Harry S. Truman

57. Government is not reason, it is not eloquence -- it is force.     -- George Washington

58. Economy

59. There can be no economy where there is no efficiency.     -- Beaconsfield

60. What this country needs is a good five-cent Nickel.     -- Franklin P. Adams

61. It is of no small commendation to manage a little well. To live well in abundance is the praise of the estate, not of the person. I will study more how to give a good account of my little, than how to make it more.     -- Joseph Hall

62. Economy is a way of spending money without getting any pleasure out of it.     -- Armand Salacrou

63. The man who will live above his present circumstances, is in great danger of soon living beneath them; or as the Italian proverb says, "The man that lives by hope, will die by despair."     -- Joseph Addison

64. Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.     -- Benjamin Franklin

65. Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.     -- Christian Nestell Bovee

66. He who will not economize will have to agonize.     -- Confucius

67. Nothing is cheap which is superfluous, for what one does not need, is dear at a penny.     -- Plutarch

68. A penny saved is two pence clear,  A pin a day's a groat a year.     -- Benjamin Franklin

69. I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers ... We must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the     -- Thomas Jefferson

70. Without economy none can be rich, and with it few will be poor.     -- Samuel Johnson

71. The world abhors closeness, and all but admires extravagance; yet a slack hand shows weakness, and a tight hand strength.     -- Thomas Fowell Buxton

72. Have more than thou showest,Speak less than thou knowest.     -- William Shakespeare

73. Ere you consult your fancy, consult your purse.     -- Benjamin Franklin

74. Let honesty and industry be thy constant companions, and spend one penny less than thy clear gains; then shall thy pocket begin to thrive; creditors will not insult, nor want oppress, nor hungerness bite, nor nakedness freeze thee.     -- Benjamin Franklin

75. The market...puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes: to become a business proposition, to pay its own way, to show black ink on the bottom line. It turns news into entertainment, schol     -- Christopher Lasch (The Revolt of the Elites, 1995)

76. If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.     -- George Bernard Shaw

Power

77. Every Communist must grasp the truth: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."     -- Mao Tse-Tung

78. Man is born to seek power, yet his actual condition makes him a slave to the power of others.     -- Hans J. Morgenthau

79. Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.     -- Charles Caleb Colton

80. We often say how impressive power is. But I do not find it impressive at all. The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure. They are necessary symbols. They protect what we cherish. But they are witness to hum     -- Lyndon Baines Johnson

81. Nothing destroys authority so much as the unequal and untimely interchange of power, pressed too far and relaxed too much.     -- Francis Bacon

82. Power does not corrupt man; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.     -- George Bernard Shaw

83. The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.     -- James Madison

84. A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it.     -- Jean Rostand

85. There is no knowledge that is not power.     -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

86. We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.     -- Max Lerner

87. The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power.     -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

88. Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.     -- Seneca

89. I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.     -- Edmund Burke

90. In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding on the back of the tiger ended up inside.     -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

91. Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control -- these three alone lead to power.     -- Alfred Lord Tennyson

92. We defend and we build a way of life, not for America alone, but for all mankind.     -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

President

1. The White House is the finest prison in the world.     -- Harry S. Truman

2. I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House--with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.     -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

3. The American presidency will demand more than ringing manifestos issued from the rear of the battle. It will demand that the President place himself in the very thick of the fight; that he care passionately about the fate of the people he leads ...     -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

4. President means chief servant.     -- Mahatma Gandhi

5. My most fervent prayer is to be a President who can make it possible for every boy in this land to grow to manhood by loving his country--instead of dying for it.     -- Lyndon Baines Johnson

6. When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe.     -- Clarence Darrow

7. No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.     -- Thomas Jefferson

Nation

93. A nation is a thing that lives and acts like a man and men are the particulars of which it is composed.     -- Josiah Gilbert Holland

94. Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life.     -- James A. Garfield

95. A nation, like a person, has a mind--a mind that must be kept informed and alert, that must know itself, that understands the hopes and needs of its neighbors--all the other nations that live within the narrowing circle of the world.     -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

96. No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation.     -- Woodrow Wilson

97. The nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort; yes, than the nation's life itself.     -- Woodrow Wilson

98. A nation never falls but by suicide.     -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

99. A nation is a totality of men united through community of fate into a community of character.     -- Otto Bauer

Nationalism

100. We are in the midst of a great transition from narrow nationalism to international partnership.     -- Lyndon Baines Johnson

101. There is a higher form of patriotism than nationalism, and that higher form is not limited by the boundaries of one's country; but by a duty to mankind to safeguard the trust of civilization.     -- Oscar S. Strauss

102. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.     -- Albert Einstein

103. The root of the problem is very simply stated: if there were no sovereign independent states, if the states of the civilized world were organized in some sort of federalism, as the states of the American Union, for instance, are organized, there would be no international war as we know it ... The main obstacle is nationalism.     -- Norman Angell

104. Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.     -- Thorstein Veblen

1. War

2. Diplomats are just as essential in starting a war as soldiers are in finishing it.     -- Will Rogers

3. A riot is a spontaneous outburst. A war is subject to advance planning.     -- Richard M. Nixon

4. The next World War will be fought with stones.     -- Albert Einstein

5. War is the science of destruction.     -- John Abbott

6. The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.     -- Harry Emerson Fosdick

7. War is hell.     -- William Tecumseh Sherman

8. War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.     -- French Proverb

9. I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace is an interlude during war.     -- Georges Clemenceau

10. When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing.     -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

11. When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty.     -- Arthur Ponsonby

12. Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.     -- Abraham Flexner

13. I have always said that a conference was held for one reason only, to give everybody chance to get sore at everybody else. Sometimes it takes two or three conferences to scare up a war, but generally one will do it.     -- Will Rogers

14. I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.     -- Edmund Burke

15. Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.     -- Carl Sandburg

16. How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy.     -- Friedrich Nietzsche

17. The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.     -- T. S. Eliot

18. Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war.     -- Thucydides

19. It is well that war is so terrible--we shouldn't grow too fond of it.     -- Robert E. Lee

20. The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.     -- Lester Bowles Pearson

21. Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.     -- John Parker

22. In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign.... Secondly, a just cause.... Thirdly ... a rightful intention.     -- Saint Thomas Aquinas

23. There is a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away. There is a time to fight, and that time has now come.     -- Peter Muhlenberg

24. War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.     -- Karl von Clausewitz

25. War challenges virtually every other institution of society--the justice and equity of its economy, the adequacy of its political systems, the energy of its productive plant, the bases, wisdom and purposes of its foreign policy.     -- Walter Millis

26. We have to go along a road covered with blood. We have no other alternative. For us it is a matter of life or death, a matter of living or existing. We have to be ready to face the challenges that await us.     -- Gamel Abdel Nasser

27. All of us who served in one war or another know very well that all wars are the glory and the agony of the young.     -- Gerald R. Ford

28. Soldiers usually win the battles and generals get the credit for them.     -- Napoleon Bonaparte

29. The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.     -- John A. Fisher

30. Only two great groups of animals, men and ants, indulge in highly organized mass warfare.     -- Charles H. Maskins

31. There was never a good war, or a bad peace.     -- Benjamin Franklin

32. I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.     -- Ulysses S. Grant

33. There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom.     -- Andrew B. Law

34. No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it.     -- Winston Churchill

35. If the B-2 is invisible, just announce you've built 100 of them and don't build them.     -- John Kasich (House Budget Committee Chairman)

Diplomacy

36. I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I speak the truth, and they never believe me.     -- Camillo di Cavour

37. Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which states seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of arts, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war.     -- Randolph Bourne

38. International arbitration may be defined as the substitution of many burning questions for a smouldering one.     -- Ambrose Bierce

39. Diplomacy: lying in state.     -- Oliver Herford

40. The principle of give and take is the principle of diplomacy--give one and take ten.     -- Mark Twain

41. Diplomacy is the art of letting someone have your way.     -- Daniele Vare

42. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.     -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

43. Diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest way.     -- Isaac Goldberg

44. A drop of honey catches more flies than a hogshead of vinegar.     -- Proverb

45. Modern diplomats approach every problem with an open mouth.     -- Arthur J. Goldberg

46. A diplomat's life is made up of three ingredients: protocol, Geritol and alcohol.     -- Adlai E. Stevenson

47. I never refuse. I contradict. I sometimes forget.     -- Benjamin Disraeli

48. This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not always conform to our whims.     -- James Reston

49. 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.     -- Anonymous

50. American diplomacy is easy on the brain but hell on the feet.     -- Charles G. Dawes

51. To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.     -- Will Durant

52. The only summit meeting that can succeed is the one that does not take place.     -- Barry M. Goldwater

53. A diplomat is a man who remembers a lady's birthday but forgets her age.     -- Anonymous

54. ... the patriotic art of lying for one's country.     -- Ambrose Bierce