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Politics Quotes

The list of top contributors is odd: Benito Mussolini has the most entries, then Disraeli, with a Nigerian governor, Bernard Crick and Jean Chrétien behind them. It reflects what Wikiquote editors chose to collect, not a ranking of who said it best.

The better-sourced lines are drier. Edmund Burke, in 1770, dismissed the cant of “Not men, but measures.” Stanisław Jerzy Lec’s Unkempt Thoughts (1957) has the shortest joke on the page, “a Trojan horse race.” Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary (1911) calls politics a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Three well-known lines are flagged misattributed: “Politics is the art of the possible” (Franklin), a remark about playing your cards face upwards (H. G. Wells), and “politics have no relation to morals” (Machiavelli).

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Most quoted on politics:

Fascists have no interest in winning that battle. They don't care about respecting free speech or the right to a fair trial; they've openly declared their murderous intent towards people of colour (and other undesirables) and they'll pursue that goal by any means necessary.

Eleanor Penny

It is the mechanistic-mystical character of modern man that produces fascist parties, and not vice versa.
The result of erroneous political thinking is that even today fascism is conceived as a specific national characteristic of the Germans or the Japanese.

Wilhelm Reich

There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty — in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub — our immediate duty is to stop it.

E. M. Forster

The Fascist State has never tried to create its own God, as at one moment Robespierre and the wildest extremists of the Convention tried to do; nor does it vainly seek to obliterate religion from the hearts of men as does Bolshevism: Fascism respects the God of the ascetics, of the saints, of the heroes, and also God as seen and prayed to by the simple and primitive heart of the people.

Benito Mussolini

Thus, the historical circumstance of the half century preceding the Second World War gave rise to the essence of fascism: a synthesis of organic nationalism and anti-Marxist socialism, a revolutionary ideology based on a simultaneous rejection of liberalism, Marxism, and democracy.

Zeev Sternhell

This means that if someone acts like a fascist, has fascist beliefs, repeats fascist talking points, and hangs out with other fascists, the fact that they publicly denounce fascism should be worth absolutely nothing to you, and shouldn’t even enter into your consideration of whether they’re a fascist. After all, “I’m not a fascist” is exactly what a fascist would say.

Natalie Wynn

There's much that we can learn from the struggle of the Partisans, the society that they sought to build and the horrifying end to the story of Yugoslavia. These lessons resonate strongly in our current moment in history.

Jeremy Scahill

I will have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach to politics. I part company with the Congress and Gandhi. I do not believe in working up mob hysteria. Politics is a gentleman's game.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

The fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of a U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture that will triumph.

George Jackson Blood in My Eye (1971)

The pendulum will swing back.

Joseph Gurney Cannon

Throned above all, in a manner without parallel in all past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic, and delivering oracles in a language not understood of the people.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Politics makes strange bed-fellows.

Charles Dudley Warner

Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. And it has been proven as much of an illusion in Stalinist Russia as it proven an illusion in pre-Hitler Germany. Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP) after Lenin’s death.

Peter Drucker The End of Economic Man (1939)

The last resource of the bourgeoisie is fascism, which replaces social and historical criteria with biological and zoological standards so as thus to free itself from any and all restrictions in the struggle for capitalist property.

Leon Trotsky

It is not nuclear violence alone that is the threat to mankind. It is the willingness to kill our fellow human beings – the innocent as well as the noninnocent- for political ends. Unless we are willing to redirect our time, energy, and resources away from perfecting the means of mass destruction of whatever sort and into exploring nonviolent alternatives to war itself, our efforts to combat the threat of nuclear war are likely to be of no avail.

Robert L. Holmes On War and Morality (1989)

The politics of the unpolitical—these are the politics of those who desire to be pure in heart: the politics of men without personal ambition; of those who have not desires wealth or an unequal share of worldly possessions; of those who have always striven, whatever their race or condition, for human values and not for national or sectional interests. For our Western world, Christ is the supreme example of this unselfish devotion to the good of humanity, and the Sermon on the Mount is the source of all the politics of the unpolitical.

Herbert Read

Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of stabilized society. She has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.

Winston Churchill

Yet the Fascist State is unique, and an original creation. It is not reactionary, but revolutionary, in that it anticipates the solution of the universal political problems which elsewhere have to be settled in the political field by the rivalry of parties, the excessive power of the Parliamentary regime and the irresponsibility of political assemblies.

Benito Mussolini

For liberalism, the individual is the end and society the means… For fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends. The state, therefore, guards and protects the welfare and development of individuals not for their exclusive interest but because of the identity of the needs of individuals with those of society as a whole.

Alfredo Rocco The Political Doctrine of Fascism (1925)

Men argue differently, from natural phenomena and political appearances: they have different capacities, different degrees of knowledge, and different intelligence. But the means of information and judging are open to both: each professes to act from his own skill and sagacity; and, therefore, neither needs to communicate to the other.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield

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