POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT




Liberal friendly quotes:

"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio speech, October 26, 1939.

"Me, I think government is a tool, like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build with or you can use a hammer to destroy with. Whether government is good or bad depends on what you use it for and how well you use it. On the whole, it's a poor idea to put people in charge of government who don't believe in using it.
"I believe government should be used in order to form a more perfect Union, to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
-- Molly Ivins, Nothin' But Good Times Ahead, p. 56

"Government can easily exist without law, but law cannot exist without government."
--Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them."
-- Mark Twain, Notebook, 1898

"No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more."
-- Mark Twain, The Gilded Age

"Citizenship should be placed above everything else, even learning. Is there in any college of the land a chair of citizenship where good citizenship and all that it implies is taught? There is not one -- that is, not one where sane citizenship is taught. There are some which teach insane citizenship, bastard citizenship, but that is all. Patriotism! Yes; but patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest."
-- Mark Twain, speech, 5/14/1908

"The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities."
-- Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity

And from the other side...

"No man ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American voter."
-- H.L. Mencken, attributed

"In political matters feeling often decides more correctly than reason."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

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