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

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

The President is always abused. If he isn’t, he isn’t doing anything.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.

The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people. In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.

It’s been my experience in politics that you can try and plan it out: ‚I’m going to hit the three ball which will hit the eight ball.‘ You’ve just got to go run and try to do everything right. And then have a little luck.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

I like working-class people, generally speaking.

A lot of people have a sense-of-entitlement mentality that somebody else ought to do these things for them. People are mad at the government for not getting jobs for them. I don’t understand why it’s the government’s responsibility.

I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one of the things that women have is men.

I think politicians really go with the tide.

People love conspiracy theories.

In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.

I believed what my father taught me about the separation of church and state, so when I was President I never invited Billy Graham to have services in the White House because I didn’t think that was appropriate. He was injured a little bit, until I explained it to him.

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.

I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven’t belonged to any company or any system. It isn’t easy to live like this in Japan.

We need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This isn’t a matter of political correctness. It’s a matter of understanding what makes us strong. The world respects us not just for our arsenal; it respects us for our diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

People like to talk about war.

I had three points I wanted to make: That not everybody in Hollywood is on the left, that Obama has broken a lot of the promises he made when he took office, and that the people should feel free to get rid of any politician who’s not doing a good job. But I didn’t make up my mind exactly what I was going to say until I said it.

The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

You can’t just have slogans, you can’t just have catchy phrases. You have to have an agenda. And I think what the Republican Party has to do, if it’s going to incorporate the tea party efforts in it, is to come up with an agenda that the American people can see, touch, and actually believe in, and something they believe in.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.

I’m not a conservative of any kind.

I don’t really regard myself as a political figure.

I do not believe that government should be in the business of telling women what they should do with their bodies.

It isn’t generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn’t generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it’s in the nature of hierarchy.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won’t tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, ‚Well, you know: It’s secret.‘

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

In many ways, when you’re a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

We need an adult in the White House. When making life-or-death, war-or-peace decisions, a president can’t just pop off or lash out irrationally.

It’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

My objection to Liberalism is this that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind namely, politics of philosophical ideas instead of political principles.

If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.

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

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

A good Catholic meddles in politics, offering the best of himself, so that those who govern can govern. But what is the best that we can offer to those who govern? Prayer!

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

Nobody wants to put the creditworthiness of the United States in jeopardy. Nobody wants to see the United States default. So we’ve got to seize this moment, and we have to seize it soon.