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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:

Standing by me and helping my work as newspaper man were the Fascisti. They were composed of revolutionary spirits who believed in intervention. They were youths—the students of the universities, the socialist syndicalists—destroying faith in Karl Marx by their ideals.

Benito Mussolini

The struggle between the two worlds [Fascism and Democracy] can permit no compromises. The new cycle which begins with the ninth year of the Fascist regime places the alternative in even greater relief — either we or they, either their ideas or ours, either our State or theirs!

Benito Mussolini Fundamentals of critical argumentation (2005)

Fascism is the cult of organised murder, invented by the arch-enemies of society. It tends to destroy civilization and revert man to his most barbarous state. Mussolini and Hitler might well be called the devils of an age, for they are playing hell with civilization.

Marcus Garvey Authors take Sides on the Spanish War (1937)

The peoples of Yugoslavia do not want Fascism. They do not want a totalitarian regime, they do not want to become slaves of the German and Italian financial oligarchy as they never wanted to become reconciled to the semi-colonial dependence imposed on them by the so-called Western democracies after the first imperialist war.

Josip Broz Tito

[P]olitics is always just a few steps away from The Lord of the Flies...

Charlie Sykes

Donald was incompetent, but others in Donald's administration were anything but. What they built was a lean and ruthless machine for advancing fascism. With the help of some luck, complicit institutions, an unprepared media, and a party of willing converts, that machine largely succeeded.

Mary L. Trump The Reckoning (2021)

… that is the nature of politics: poly, meaning more than one, and ticks, meaning blood-sucking parasites.

Kinky Friedman

[T]he only mark-to-market thing in politics is Election Day; everything else is hot air.

Mike Murphy Interview with Bill Kristol (2018)

Fascism was born to inspire a faith not of the Right (which at bottom aspires to conserve everything, even injustice) or of the Left (which at bottom aspires to destroy everything, even goodness), but a collective, integral, national faith.

José Antonio Primo de Rivera

I don't understand how people can disconnect politics from daily life, because that's how politics count. We're daily life people and that's where politics become a reality to us.

Naomi Shihab Nye with Al Jadid (1996)

Perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it and seeing it, to found one in himself. But whether it exists anywhere or ever exists is no matter; for this is the only commonwealth in whose politics he can ever take part.

Plato

Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages, is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory.

Georgi Dimitrov

When brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.

Benito Mussolini

“My only remaining question is, why an honest pimp, con man, fraud, and kidnapper like yourself would get involved in something as nasty as large-scale corporate activity?”
“The money was good.”
“Oh, but if that’s your excuse, what will be next? Politics?”

John Barnes The Lost Princess Man (2009)

... for our English grumbling is equally distributed between the weather and politics, and the case would be desperate when confined to the last.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon Romance and Reality (1831)

Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can direct human society. It denies that numbers can govern by means of periodical consultations: It asserts the unavoidable fruitful and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage.

Benito Mussolini

Fascism, with its violence, gets rid of everything: it attacks universities, it closes them and crushes them; it attacks intellectuals, represses them and persecutes them; it attacks political parties; it attacks trade union organizations; it attacks all mass and cultural organizations. Therefore, nothing is more violent, more retrograde and more illegal than fascism.

Fidel Castro

The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide; he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, life which should be high and full, lived for oneself, but above all for others — those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after.

Benito Mussolini The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)

Fascists were not conservative in any very meaningful sense... in a meaningful sense, were revolutionaries.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

In all times and ages, political crimes have always been punished more severely than others – even in the degenerate State of Nicholas II. The fact that in modern 'democracies' we lean towards political clemency proves only one thing: the loss of any sense of the 'political' in general.

Alexandre Kojève The Notion of Authority (2020)

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