Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan’s writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

One way to make sure crime doesn’t pay would be to let the government run it.

Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.

By most accounts, Aristide is the most popular figure in Haiti.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

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

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

President Assad, I worked with. I know him reasonably well, met with him a few times, and he’s a liar.

I have decided in 2020 to run for president.

Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.

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.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

There might be some serious fun in politics.

A politician is a man who understands government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead for 15 years.

If the federal government had been around when the Creator was putting His hand to this state, Indiana wouldn’t be here. It’d still be waiting for an environmental impact statement.

Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

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.

A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state.

Let me even say before I even get inaugurated, during the transition we are going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America.

We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics – trying to play a serious part in the world – to a culture that’s really entertainment-based.

For success of any mission, it is necessary to have creative leadership. Creative leadership is vital for government, non-governmental organisations as well as for industries.

The mob is the mother of tyrants.

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

There’s a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

You want to know whether we’re better off? I’ve got a little bumper sticker for you: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive! Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!

I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

My age is very insignificant to me. I don’t think about it, but the world does. The world likes young people in general.

Before I went to jail, I was active in politics as a member of South Africa’s leading organization – and I was generally busy from 7 A.M. until midnight. I never had time to sit and think.

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

I’m glad I’m not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone’s tape recording what you say.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Fear is the mother of morality.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

The White House is the finest prison in the world.

I almost laughed about the Machiavellian plans of the presidents of the United States.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.

Mitt Romney subscribes to the cynical logic that says the American dream belongs to some of us but not all of us.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

People are finding it harder and harder to relate to foreign policy.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

For me every ruler is alien that defies public opinion.

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.