[Environmentalists] are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat Party ... I'm proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans.
Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" used to mean we watched the government --- not the other way around.
Bill Stewart
Dirksen's Three Laws of Politics
1) Get elected.
2) Get
re-elected.
3) Don't get mad, get even.
Everett Dirksen
A conservative is a man who wants the rules changed so that no one can make a pile the way he did.
Gregory Nunn
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
Max Weinreich (1894-1969)
A modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A politician thinks of the next election --- a statesman, of the next generation.
James Freeman Clarke
A statesman is a dead politician. This country needs more statesmen.
According to the "New York Times", last year White House lawyers concluded that President Bush could legally order interrogators to torture and even kill people in the interest of national security -- so if that's legal, what the hell are we charging Saddam Hussein with?
Jay Leno
Americans always do the right thing, once they have exhausted all other possibilities.
Winston Churchill
One Man's Position on Ecology
Americans did not fight and win the wars of the 20th century to make the world safe for green vegetables.
Richard Darman, OMB Director
Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
David Broder
As a POW in Vietnam, I was kept in the dark and fed scraps. Why would I
As long as I am mayor of this city [Jersey City, New Jersey] the great industries are secure. We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, That man is a Red, that man is a Communist. You never hear a real American talk like that.
Frank Hague (1896-1956)
At any given moment, half the people in the world are either making mud bricks or field stripping their AK-47s.
Neal Stephenson
At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child --- miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosphy of sniveling brats.
P.J.O'Rourke
At twenty-six, Kate, though not promiscuous, had slept with most of the decent men in public life.
Renata Adler
Bad laws are more likely to be supplemented than repealed.
Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.
George Jean Nathan
Because my wife wouldn't want to move to a smaller house.
Bob Hope, when asked "Why don't you run for President?"
Charisma is a spiritual gift. It's not my fault other people have to use other things --- like commercials.
Jesse Jackson
Democracy is ... the worship of jackals by jackasses.
H.L.Mencken
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw
Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person standing between Nixon and the White House.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), in 1960
Don't worry about this. It isn't going to amount to anything.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, during planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion
Every American should have above average income, and my Administration is going to see they get it.
Bill Clinton on the campaign trail
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 16 April 1953
Every private citizen has a public responsibility.
Myra Janco Daniels
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
Daniel Moynihan
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evilminded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal and wellmeaning but without understanding.
Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
John F. Kennedy
Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.
John F. Kennedy
Gary Hart is just Jerry Brown without the fruit flies.
Robert Strauss
He [George Bush] grew up in a little town near Amarillo called Kennebunkport. He can tie and rope a lobster with the best of 'em.
Pat Buchanan, on Bush's claimed Texan residency
He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln
Hitler is a queer fellow who will never become Chancellor; the best he can hope for is to be head of the Postal Department.
Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, President of Germany, 1931
Hungry? Out of work? Eat a Republican.
I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.
Nancy Reagan
I believe we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people --- very well indeed.
Franklin Roosevelt, referring to Joseph Stalin, 1943
I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy --- but that could change.
Vice President Dan Quayle, 5/22/89
I couldn't have called him an s.o.b. I didn't know he was one at the time.
John F. Kennedy, on Canada's Prime Minister John Diefenbaker
I don't like this word bomb. It is not a bomb, it is a device, which explodes.
French Ambassador to New Zealand, referring to French nuclear tests in the South Pacific
I don't need bodyguards.
James Hoffa, June 1975
I don't understand how poor people think.
George W. Bush
I don't use the words "Democrat" and "Republican." I use the words "liberal" and "American."
James Watt
I have been too lenient.
Adolf Hitler
I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.
Ronald Reagan
I have ordered my staff to never, ever, utter the words 'compassionate conservative'. This silly and insulting term was created by liberal Republicans and is nothing more than code for surrendering our values and principles.
Dan Quayle, 1999
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson
I know from my own experience that America is a land of opportunity, where
I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
Alan Greenspan, before a Congressional committee
I love my country... but I fear my government!
I might have gone to West Point, but I was too proud to speak to a congressman.
Will Rogers (1879-1935)
I must follow my people. Am I not their leader?
Benjamin Disraeli
I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.
Harry S. Truman (1884-1972)
I remember when "legal" used to mean lawful; now it means some kind of loophole.
Leo Kessler
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed.
Abraham Lincoln
I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.
Jerry Brown, Governor of California
I think it would be a good idea.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) when asked what he thought of Western civilization
I went around the world last year and you want to know something? It hates each other.
Edward J. Mannix
I would like to suggest that Ronald Reagan is politically dead.
NBC political correspondant Tom Pettit, January 22, 1980
I would not like to be a political leader in Russia. They never know when they're being taped.
Richard Nixon
I'm honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein.
George W. Bush
I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat.
Will
I'm not very analytical. You know I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things.
George W. Bush, June 2003
I'm the commander. See? I don't need to explain. I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.
George W. Bush
If we cease to judge this world, we may find ourselves, very quickly, in one which is infinitely worse.
Margaret Atwood
If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
If Jerry Brown is the answer, it must be a damned peculiar question.
Senator Lloyd Bentson, on Brown's 1992 campaign
If guns are outlawed, how can we shoot the liberals?
Mississippi state Senator Mike
Gunn (R)
If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
Nixon's Principle
If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.
Lawrence J. Peter
If you are working against lowering the birth rate then you are automatically working for raising the death rate.
Dr. P. Ehrlich (Newsweek, 5May92)
If you live in a country run by committee, be on the committee.
Graham Summer
If you think it's easy to be a politician, try to straddle a fence and keep both ears to the ground at the same time.
The Globe and Mail
If you've seen one tree, you've seen them all.
Ronald Reagan
In America, anyone can become president. That's one of the risks you take.
Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
In a very Christian way, as far as I'm concerned, he can go to hell.
Jimmy Carter, on the Rev. Jerry Falwell
In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not," the individual can practice a certain amount of eccentricity; when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason," he is under continuous pressure to make him behave exactly the same way as everyone else.
George Orwell
In politics, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.
Willie Brown
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961
In the future, there will be fewer but better Russians.
Josef Stalin
Indifference is the only sure defense.
Jody Powell
It doesn't matter who votes. What matters is who counts the votes.
Josef Stalin
It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found to be generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will be ages of despotism, wereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak.
George Orwell (1903-1950)
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for any public office.
H. L. Mencken
It is interesting to note that the death penalty for individuals is less controversial than the mere suggestion that a few corporations may have forfeited their right to exist. How many people does a company have to harm before we question if it ought to exist?
Paul Hawken
It is more profitable for your congressman to support the tobacco industry than your life.
Jackie Mason
It took about 150 years, starting with a Bill of Rights that reserved to the states and the people all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government, to produce a Supreme Court willing to rule that growing corn to feed to your own hogs is interstate commerce and can therefore be regulated by Congress.
David Friedman
It's not "vote fraud" unless you can prove those dead guys would've voted the other way.
It's useless to hold a person to anything he says while he's in love, drunk, or running for office.
Shirley McLaine
[L]iberals by nature look for information and conservatives look for ammunition.
Al Franken
My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.
President Reagan, testing a microphone for his weekly radio broadcast
My grandmother's brain was dead, but her heart was still beating. It was the first time we ever had a Democrat in the family.
Emo Phillips
Nancy Reagan has agreed to be the first artificial heart donor.
Andrea C. Michaels
The Rockefeller Principle
Never do anything you wouldn't want to be caught dead doing.
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
Henry Kissinger
Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then --- we elected them.
Lily Tomlin
No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
No one can earn a million dollars honestly.
William Jennings Bryan
No woman in my time will be Prime Minister or Chancellor or Foreign Secretary --- not the top jobs.
Margaret Thatcher, 1969
Nobody needs to tell me what I believe. But I do need somebody to tell me where Kosovo is.
George W. Bush
Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
John Stuart Mill
Nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do it.
Andrew Young
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach in their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant
One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.
Ronald Reagan
Only the suppressed word is dangerous.
Ludwig Boerne
Our nation must come together to unite.
George W. Bush
People who like this sort of thing will find this is the sort of thing they like.
Abraham Lincoln
People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, where the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.
L. Neil Smith
Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
P.J. O'Rourke
Politics, n: from "poly ticks", short for "many small bloodsucking insects".
Henry Spencer
Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
George W. Bush
Reagan doesn't have the presidential look.
United Artists executive, deciding not to cast Ronald Reagan, in 1964
Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. Had he run unopposed he would have lost.
Mort Sahl
Ronald Reagan's platform seems to be: Hey, I'm a big good-looking guy and I need a lot of sleep.
Roy G. Blount, Jr.
San Francisco is like granola: Take away the fruits and the nuts, and all you have left are the flakes.
Sequoia [school district] now has a minority population of 57%.
(San Francisco Chronicle, 2/10/94)
Society should relate to the police the same way that we relate to the military: of course we need it, but if it becomes the central organizing principle of our culture then we are in trouble.
Philip E. Agre
Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we will do it.
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
Bill Vaughan
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Mark Twain
Sure, the US Constitution has its faults, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
The New York Times notes that the Lord's Prayer contains 56 words, the 23rd Psalm 118 words, the Gettysburg Address 226 words, and the Ten Commandments 297 words. The U.S. Department of Agriculture directive on pricing cabbage weighs in at 15,629 words.
The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries.
Nora Ephron
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Justice Louis Brandeis
The man needs to drop bread crumbs on his way into sentences so he can find his way out again.
TV writer Sherry Coben, on President Reagan's speech habits
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
George Orwell
The only way to deal with bureaucrats is with stealth and sudden violence.
UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali
The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.
Maureen Murphy
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.
Thomas Jefferson
The tragic lesson of guilty men walking around free in this country has not been lost on the criminal community.
Richard Nixon
The whole point of free expression is not to make ideas exempt from criticism but to expose them to it.
Garry Wills
There are no restrictions. It is only that there have been several things which have been forbidden by the law.
Dr Oktay Vural, Turkish Minister of Transport & Communications, describing Turkey's new Internet law
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
Ayn Rand
There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
Winston Churchill
There ought to be limits to freedom.
Presidential candidate George W. Bush
They misunderestimated me.
George W. Bush
Those people don't want to govern. They want to rule.
Texas Representative Gonzalo Barrientos, on Republican forced redistricting
They [La Prensa] accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it.
Nelba Blandon, Nicaraguan Interior Ministry Director of Censorship
They say it's the responsibility of the media to look at government --- especially the President --- with a microscope. I don't argue with that, but when they use a proctoscope, it's going too far.
Richard Nixon
They will only cause the lower classes to move about needlessly.
The Duke of Wellington, on early steam railroads
Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
This administration has a faith-based attitude to intelligence: "We know the answers. Give us the evidence to support those answers."
Gregory Thielmann, ex-Director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research under George W. Bush
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
Plato (427?-347 B.C.)
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
Fredrick Douglass, 1857
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Ben Franklin
Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.
Ben Franklin
To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my
Today the Washington Post revealed that in 2002, the Justice Department sent a memo to the White House justifying the use of torture. Torture -- that's our Department of "Justice" -- they say "it's OK to torture people." What's the Department of Education doing, burning books?
Jay Leno
Vote early and vote often.
Al Capone (1899-1947)
We are not disorganized. We just have a kind of organization that transcends understanding.
Jacques Barzaghi, campaign aide to Jerry Brown
We're going to keep on building the party [the Texas GOP] until we're hunting Democrats with dogs.
Senator Phil Gramm, R-Texas
We're poor people.
Newt Gingrich, describing his wife and himself
Well, I would --- if they realized that we --- again, if --- if we led them back to that stalemate only because our retaliatory power, our seconds, or strike at them after our first strike, would be so destructive they, they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off.
President Ronald Reagan, on the MX missile
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
Thomas Jefferson
IRS Motto
We've got what it takes to take what you've got!
What Jefferson should have said was "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of intelligence," for the latter has never been a recognizable goal of our nation.
John Irving
When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000 a year, that's middle class.
Rep. Fred Heineman, R-N.C.
When I die, I want to be buried in Chicago so I can still be active in politics.
Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY)
When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply, "Ours."
Vine Deloria, Jr.
When congressman Newt Gingrich was a graduate student at Tulane University, I baptized him by immersion into the membership of the St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church. Perhaps I didn't hold him under long enough.
(The Rev.) G. Avery Lee
When the Khmer Rouge leaders in Phnom Penh had problems with the water supply, they realised that none of them knew where the water in the taps came from.
When the government fears the people, it is liberty. When the people fear the government, it is tyranny.
Thomas Paine
When you say that you agree to a thing in principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
Otto Von Bismarck
You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war.
William Randolph Hearst
You know if there was any piece of legislation I would pass it would be to blow up colleges of education. I know that's not politically correct...
Reid Lyon, National Institute of Child Health and Development