I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government other than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false ‚intelligence‘ and selected ‚leaks.‘

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

Although the big word on the left is ‚compassion,‘ the big agenda on the left is dependency.

I don’t like to see a president who is just out campaigning all year long or for the last four years. I’d like to see somebody who’s going in the office. In fact, I’d like to not see them because that way you’d be sure that they’d be working.

Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.

When the President does it, that means that it’s not illegal.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Our society is illuminated by the spiritual insights of the Hebrew prophets. America and Israel have a common love of human freedom, and they have a common faith in a democratic way of life.

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting ‚the rich‘ to pay ‚their fair share‘ is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics.

So far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the constitution of India. My government will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.

Politics has always been ugly to me, and yet I accept that as a fact of life.

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.

Republicans are men of narrow vision, who are afraid of the future.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

Politically there were failures. And also on the personal level, there were tremendous failures.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.

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.

Winning the election is a good-news, bad-news kind of thing. Okay, now you’re the mayor. The bad news is, now you’re the mayor.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life’s savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.

Even if the politics needed doesn’t exist today, we still need to use our voices to make sure that the people in power are focused on the right things. Because this is a democracy, and in a democracy, people are the ones who run the country.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

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.

Society is at odds with itself.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

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.

You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.

I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21 because he promised to get us out of the Korean War.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.

The second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery.

Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other’s speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

There will be no whitewash in the White House.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

I’m not a politician. And I don’t want to be.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

The U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

The FBI should not be a political body.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

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

Americans… still believe in an America where anything’s possible – they just don’t think their leaders do.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.

The fault lines are shifting from the boundaries of nations into the web of our societies and the streets of our cities. And, terrorism and extremism are a global force that are larger than their changing names, groups, territories and targets.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.

Society therefore is as ancient as the world.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

The last thing I wanted to do was to be a wartime President.