The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

The thought of being President frightens me and I do not think I want the job.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

I have considered voting Conservative because I am so against the Labour party.

We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

The President’s post should not be politicised. Once a president is elected, he is above politics.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Politics, according to the Social Doctrine of the Church, is one of the highest forms of charity, because it serves the common good. I cannot wash my hands, eh? We all have to give something!

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently, I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females).

To be safe at the expense of the liberty of other people is a difficult equation.

I will never retire from politics, the revolution, or the ideas I have.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and that’s what everybody needs to know.

I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.

It’s easy being a humorist when you’ve got the whole government working for you.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice.

I tend not to look back and dwell on a project once it is finished.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we’ve ever known.

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society.

I guess you’d call me an independent, since I’ve never identified myself with one party or another in politics. I always decide my vote by taking as careful a look as I can at the actual candidates and issues themselves, no matter what the party label.

For a sitting U.S. president to see our allies as freeloaders is nuts.

I definitely wasn’t anything special when I first started but I think I adapted quite quickly into racing and it became a bit better slowly. All of cadets, the first four years of karting, I only won one proper race, one! Which was the British Open Championship at PFI and I started 21st and I won.

An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.

While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

The time has come for us to draw the line. The time has come for the responsible leaders of both political parties to take a stand against overgrown Government and for the American taxpayer.

I think the first duty of society is justice.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic, and certainly, to a kingdom or estate, a just and honourable war is the true exercise.

There’s some jerks. There’s some big egos. There are a few that think they’re one of the Founding Fathers… in both parties.

Even as you make progress, you need the discipline to keep from backtracking and sabotaging the success as it’s happening.

It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still.

In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

You do the policy, I’ll do the politics.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we’ve always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.

I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I’ll probably… drop writing children’s books and become a political cartoonist again.

Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop.

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

We are not retreating – we are advancing in another direction.

The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.

For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and establishing an economy and a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.