The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

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

Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.

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

You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I’m innocent. You’ve got to believe I’m innocent. If you don’t, take my job.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

Unlike my opponent, I will not let oil companies write this country’s energy plan, or endanger our coastlines, or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers.

Where do the evils like corruption arise from? It comes from the never-ending greed. The fight for corruption-free ethical society will have to be fought against this greed and replace it with ‚what can I give‘ spirit.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Part of the problem is there are people in Washington, D.C. in positions of power to whom the border is just a nuisance, and I think some of them believe that illegal immigration is a moral good. It is not. It undermines legal immigration.

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

Society therefore is as ancient as the world.

I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.

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

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.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America – there’s the United States of America.

You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned? Wait till I whup George Foreman’s behind.

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

Work is that which you dislike doing but perform for the sake of external rewards. At school, this takes the form of grades. In society, it means money, status, privilege.

Since I’m the president and Democrats have controlled the House and the Senate, it’s understandable that people are saying, you know, ‚What have you done?‘

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

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

I’m interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

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!

Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.

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

I don’t think consensus-building politics is what I’m meant to be doing.

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.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

I am not a crook.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman – not me, not Bill, nobody – more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.

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

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.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

I am certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama.

A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.

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

It’s human nature to gripe, but I’m going ahead and doing the best I can.

The 1928 Republican Convention opened with a prayer. If the Lord can see His way clear to bless the Republican Party the way it’s been carrying on, then the rest of us ought to get it without even asking.

Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

The doctrine that everything is fine as long as the population is quiet, that applies in the Middle East, applies in Central America, it applies in the United States.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

There were the questions of what kind of First Lady I would be, what issues would I focus on. Those were the questions that were being pounded on me through the campaign. A lot of times, I wondered what in the world Barack was even getting us into.