Political Commentary Quotes

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
― H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

“Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses.”
― H.L. Mencken

“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
(writing about US President Warren G. Harding)”
― H.L. Mencken

“We are all born to love people and use things. Unfortunately, we grow to love things and use people...”
― T. Rafael Cimino

“Democracy is not simply a license to indulge individual whims and proclivities. It is also holding oneself accountable to some reasonable degree for the conditions of peace and chaos that impact the lives of those who inhabit one’s beloved extended community.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.”
― Alan Dershowitz

“In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.”
― Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams

“Wherever there is power, greed, and money, there is corruption.”
― Ken Poirot

“With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.”
― Doris Lessing

“Under democracy one party always devotes it's chief energies to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-- and both commonly succeed, and are right. the United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent.It's history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.”
― H.L. Mencken

“A lot of lip service gets paid to being honest, but no one really wants to hear it unless what's being said is the party line.”
― Colin Quinn

“The Delores tank rolled on inexorably, “You get a mortgage to buy a house, a larger mortgage than the previous owner because the price of the house has been artificially increased by the market, which is controlled by the banks. Then you live in the house for a few years paying a lot more in mortgage payments than you would if you were renting a similar property. But hey, you ‘own’ it and can ‘do things to it’… things that cost even more money, by the way… so you maintain its upkeep, improve it with say a new kitchen or bathroom; the more salubrious the neighbourhood the more expensive the kitchen would need to be – a Küche & Cucina, say; impressing your cleaner is very important after all and at the end you sell it to someone else for more than you paid for it so they’ll need an even bigger mortgage. And all the while everyone is paying all this money to the banks and the banks give the money to their shareholders, the biggest of whom are the incredibly rich. This, when you boil it all down, means that you’re taking a large sum out of your wages and passing it across to some rich person to live large, whilst you and others like you struggle to make their monthly payments. Basically you’ve been screwed, Doc, but somehow they’ve convinced you that you own a bit of England, when the truth is you don’t really own anything, you’re just renting it at a higher cost and they can take it back from you any time they want. It’s all just a card trick, Doc. All just ‘smoke and mirrors’ and that’s what’s getting to me.”
― Arun D. Ellis, Corpalism

“What interests me, personally, is work which in some way, speaks the truth to power…I don’t think we speak the truth to power for power’s ear, but for the ear and the imagination of future generations, who would seek to live in a world free from the malign and self-serving influence of those who wield it.”
― Irvine Welsh

“America isn't a country; it's a marketplace. The more you sell, the more at home you'll feel.”
― Iimani David

“Une bouche close empêche les mouches d'entrer." Ce qui voulait dire que le silence nous préservait des mouches et nous évitait par la même occasion les ennuis politiques.”
― Saadallah Wannous, une mort éphémère

“Underneath all that divides us, we share a common humanity. Discovery and the quest for well-being motivate all of us. We continually seek relief from the difficulties of existence, and in so doing, we change the world, hopefully for the better. My vision is that humanity will one day learn to be at peace with itself. I think that can happen only when people have their basic needs met and each is allowed to reach his or her potential.”
― Terry B. Clayton

“Such, then, were the men in whose hands lay the welfare of the country. And, it must be confessed, they knew but little and cared still less about the common people for whom they legislated.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Irrespective, he blames other people for all of those things, including forgetting his passport. I guess that's what it's like to live in a bubble, like Mark does. But a bubble implies flimsy transparency, a diaphanous space where you can see a normal life just beyond your grasp. And what Mark inhabits is more like a thick opaque dome, a murky fortress that separates him from the rest of the world. When you have so many other people doing things for you professionally and personally, you stop taking responsibility for any of it. Max Weber said that dealing with unintended consequences of your actions is what political responsibility is. This guy can't even take responsibility for leaving his passport at home, let alone influencing the US election.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Call me crazy, but I think the lunatics that run the asylum are much more capable than those that run for office.”
― Anthony P. Mauro, Sr

“hapishaneyle dağın birbirinden zerrece farkı yoktur. ikisinde de reisler var, geriye kalanlar reislerin kullarıdır. hem de ne aşağılık kullar... reisler insan gibi yaşar, ötekiler köpek gibi...”
― Yaşar Kemal

“I was a lapsing Christian, but in what direction was I lapsing? To nowhere, to nothingness. As absurd as the church was, it was an improvement over my actual life because there was at least a pretense of meaning there. Back in New York, I was just eating and taking up space, a depraved postmodern creature on the job, carrying pebbles up the media anthill.”
― Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

“... Americans were now supposed to make their own sense of the world. There was no dependable authority left to turn to, no life raft in the increasingly perilous informational sea. This coincided with an age when Americans now needed to understand more of the world than ever before. A factory worker in suburban Ohio now needed to understand the cultures of places like Bangalore and Beijing if he wanted to know why he'd lost his job. Which, incidentally, he probably had. Now broke, or under severe financial pressure, with no community leaders, no community, no news he can trust, Joe American has to turn on the Internet and tell himself a story that makes sense to him.
What story is he going to tell?”
― Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

“Perhaps nothing destroys a political system more quickly and efficiently than paranoia. The situation can be grave enough when one party to a quarrel believes the worst of the other, when it pictures its opponents as conspirators. But when both sides see the other as ruthless, treacherous, and unwilling to abide by the rules, then all room for compromise disappears.”
― T.J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

“Those who give rise to hatred are the destroyers of humanity.”
― Paul Jamiol

“Will Melania Trump divorce President Trump?”
― Steven Magee

“The Bible is not a free-floating book of ageless wisdom, an interesting historical document, or a weapon that can be put in the service of any political goal. The Bible is a gift from God to the church, given for a particular purpose: to shape that community into the kind of people who can fulfill their commission to make disciples of all nations and steward God’s good creation, anticipating its final redemption.”
― Kaitlyn Schiess, The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here

“The greatest harm any government can do is to addict its poorest citizens to welfare, thereby robbing them of a reason to work toward worthy goals.”
― William G. Alston

“Arrogance has become our national hangover”
― Nanette L. Avery

“Shahbaz Bhatti blood has not only baptized the cause of religious freedom but also marked the path toward religious freedom turning it from a right into a sacred responsibility.”
― Qamar Rafiq

“For all the Little Birds in our shared humanity who dare to explore beyond the status quo, welcome!”
― Richard Silvia , Notes to a Little Bird: Reclaiming Civil Society