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The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull. This is not always easy to achieve. (Dean G. Acheson)
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. (Henry Brooks Adams)
-2nd U.S. President..
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. (John Adams)
My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life. (Carl Andre)
-Iraqi official in the Ministry of Culture...
The last time anything deliberately political happened was in the 1980s, when an artist made paintings with the blood of soldiers who were fighting in the war against Iran. (Anonymous)
- The Rich And The Rest Of Us: A Poverty Manifesto by Cornel West...
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. (Aristotle)
The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy. (Mary Catherine Bateson)
I don't think artists can avoid being political. Artists are the proverbial canaries in the coalmine. When we stop singing, it's a sure sign of repressive times ahead. (Theresa Bayer)
The British electors will not vote for a man who does not wear a hat. (Lord Beaverbrook)
I've concluded that although Capitalism allows us to dream, encourages us to compete and leaves open our road to success, it has a major downfall. And that downfall is Greed. (Brenda Behr)
Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes. (Ingmar Bergman)
Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do. (Wendell Berry)
politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. (Ambrose Bierce)
Democracy is an abuse of statistics. (Jorge Luis Borges)
In politics, merit is rewarded by the possessor being raised, like a target, to a position to be fired at. (Christian Nestell Bovee)
Trying to take money out of politics is like trying to take jumping out of basketball. (Bill Bradley)
Politicians don't lie, they misspeak. And they don't steal, they mispocket. (Robert Brault)
Well, just being stupid and politically incorrect doesn't work. You can be politically incorrect if you're smart. (Mel Brooks)
I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team. (Art Buchwald)
People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws. (Charles Bukowski)
I must say that acting was good training for the political life that lay ahead of us. (Anthony Burgess)
-b.1729 d.1797...
Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government. (Edmund Burke)
You can't put democracy and freedom back into a box. (George W. Bush)
I'm not a professional politician. I'm a professional problem solver... (Herman Cain)
It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics. (Thomas Carlyle)
I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win. (Louis-Ferdinand Celine)
The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought. (John Jay Chapman)
Democracy is not an easy form of government, because it is never final; it is a living, changing organism, with a continuous shifting and adjusting of balance between individual freedom and general order. (Ilka Chase)
A man younger than 30 who's not a liberal has no heart and a man older than 30 who's not a conservative has no brain. (Winston Churchill)
War is merely the continuation of politics by other means. (Carl von Clausewitz)
Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America. (Bill Clinton)
Transcend political correctness and strive for human righteousness. (Anthony J. D'Angelo)
Picasso is a communist. Neither am I. (Salvador Dali)
A woman as the leader of the Free World is an impossibility. Muslim countries won't talk to you. (Geena Davis)
Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rulers or policies without violence when they are. (David Deutsch)
There is no gambling like politics. (Benjamin Disraeli)
Stop bothering me with your pathetic politics – I'd rather go to the whorehouse. (Otto Dix)
In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas - no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all. (Alexandre Dumas)
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. (Will Durant)
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority. (Will Durant)
Politics is developing more comedians than radio ever did. (Jimmy Durante)
A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement. (Abba Eban)
Democracy becomes a government of bullies, tempered by editors. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Capitalism has resulted in material
well-being but spiritual bankruptcy. (Jeffrey Eugenides)
I never vote for anyone; I always vote against. (W. C. Fields)
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity. (Gustave Flaubert)
So, Two cheers for Democracy: one, because it admits variety, and two, because it permits criticism. (E. M. Forster)
People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. (Thomas Frank)
By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties. (Buckminster Fuller)
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. (John Kenneth Galbraith)
If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircles us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake. (Mahatma Gandhi)
Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is. (Mahatma Gandhi)
Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule. (Edward Gibbon)
If Roosevelt were alive today, he'd turn over in his grave. (Samuel Goldwyn)
I'm not really involved with politics... I'm living in my cocoon with my classical music around. (Eva Green)
Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict. (Dag Hammarskjold)
There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all. (Vaclav Havel)
-to Max Stern...
In case anyone wonders, when they see the 'hammer and sickle' on the funnel of the ship... if there is a political or social significance to it, please tell them 'no' I just painted it because it was there, and besides I am a Conservative. (E. J. Hughes)
It was purely political... They were using me to get votes, and I was an easy target. 'My grandmother saw his painting and she collapsed'... But now they are out of power. (Maqbool Fida Husain)
Every politician should have been born an orphan and remain a bachelor. (Lady Bird Johnson)
Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things. (Samuel Johnson)
Avoiding political influence in our thinking as artists is nearly impossible in this plugged-in media-stimulated world. The emotion of choice is fear. (Brian Lee Jones)
The face of totalitarianism turned out to be a mask – obviously – but the face of Capitalism has no face at all. (Paul Kane)
Politics is not about objective reality, but virtual reality... a magical movie of sorts, a never-ending and infinitely revisable docudrama. Strangely, the faithful understand that the movie is not true – yet also maintain that it is the only truth that matters. (Michael Kelly)
Force against reason: reason, because it has the power of enlisting force to fight for it, will win. From the recognition of that truth has come democracy. (Rockwell Kent)
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up. (Barbara Kingsolver)
- Spaces And Dreams...
Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance. (Mark Kingwell)
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. (Henry Kissinger)
Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artist's power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence. (Paul Klee)
Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions – it only guarantees equality of opportunity. (Irving Kristol)
The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right - it lies in rejecting conventional political categories. (Christopher Lasch)
Politics matters. Ideas matter. Democracy matters, because all of us need to be able to make a difference. (Jack Layton)
It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy. (Stephen Leacock)
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. (Abraham Lincoln)
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon. (Walter Lippmann)
Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor. (James Russell Lowell)
- on live television, while handing Martin Creed the Turner Prize for Work No. 227: the lights going on and off...
At a time when political correctness is valued over honesty I would also like to say, 'Right on!' (Madonna)
The government has been satirized for your protection. (Bill Maher)
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. (Groucho Marx)
Political freedom is to be cherished indeed. But there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound to the inner personal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation: no liberty of a nation of conformists, no free nation made up of robots. (Rollo May)
Politicians only ever use predictive text. (Francis McCrossan)
Politics is an act of faith; you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public. (George McGovern)
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be. (Marshall McLuhan)
Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right. (H. L. Mencken)
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground. (H. L. Mencken)
Political art can be beautiful too. (Rose Moon)
Democracy is not a spectator sport, it's a participatory event. If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. So Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does but on what we do to support him. (Michael Moore)
The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion. (Lewis Mumford)
The politician in my country seeks votes, affection and respect, in that order. With few notable exceptions, they are simply men who want to be loved. (Edward R. Murrow)
Politics are beautiful. They enable a community to live collectively with one another. It's not about stabbing each other in the back; it's about enabling people to reach their dreams and pursue happiness. (Ben Nicholson)
It is not with architecture that one can disseminate any political ideology. (Oscar Niemeyer)
Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle. (Oscar Niemeyer)
If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists - to protect them and to promote their common welfare - all else is lost. (Barack Obama)
When will government cease being a nuisance to everybody? (Charles Olson)
Liberal: a power worshipper without power. (George Orwell)
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. (Pericles)
I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to show my politics. (Pablo Picasso)
If everyone would paint, political re-education would be unnecessary. (Pablo Picasso)
Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. (Plato)
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. (Plato)
For Forms of Government let fools contest / whatever is best administered is best. (Alexander Pope)
I find myself hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few. (Alexander Pope)
What do you do / When Democracy's all through / What do you do / When minority means you? (The Proclaimers)
Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. (Ronald Reagan)
Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who's going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it's more powerful than religion. So it's going to have to be the vigilante consumer. (Anita Roddick)
The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead. (Harold Rosenberg)
A politician should have three hats. One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected. (Carl Sandburg)
Political courage is not political suicide. (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
You go back and tell them that the New York State Supreme Court rules there's no Santa Claus. It's all over the papers. The kids read it and they don't hang up their stockings. Now what happens to all the toys that are supposed to be in those stockings? Nobody buys them. The toy manufacturers are going to like that. So they have to lay off a lot of their employees.... and they're going to adore you for it. And they're gonna say it with votes. (George Seaton)
It took a Hillary to raise a president... (Gail Sheehy)
We love the blather and boast, the charge and counter-charge of campaigning. Governing is a tougher deal. (Hugh Sidey)
True art, art that comes from the center of a people, from their very core, is inherently political. (Beverly Smith)
Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk. (Margaret Chase Smith)
The government which takes in the consent of the greatest number of the people may justly be said to have the broadest bottom; and if it be terminated in the authority of one single person, it may be said to have the narrowest top; and so makes the firmest pyramid. (Sir William Temple)
I don't think politicians should be allowed into power who are not familiar with their bodies, because that's where our bottom line is. And I know that they would make totally different decisions if they felt responsible simply for their own bodies. (Twyla Tharp)
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination. (Lionel Trilling)
A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader. (Harry S. Truman)
Life is politics, basically, but you don't just go to a gallery and put the words 'art' and 'politics' on the wall. (Luc Tuymans)
Most political speeches are unbelieveabull. (Frank Tyger)
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. (John Updike)
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence. (John Updike)
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. (Paul Valery)
Politics is like air and water. And you know if there is bad politics. Everyone is polluted. Everyone is unhealthy. See the people walking on the street: how they act... (Ai Weiwei)
Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate. (Orson Welles)
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. (E. B. White)
I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular. (E. B. White)
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. (Oscar Wilde)
There is a political and racial context behind everything that I do. Not always because I design it that way, or because I want it that way, but rather because it's just the way people look at the work of an African-American artist in this country. (Kehinde Wiley)
Democracy is disruptive... there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption. (Naomi Wolf)
If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. (Tom Wolfe)
The world has witnessed the rise and fall of monarchy, the rise and fall of dictatorship, the rise and fall of feudalism, the rise and fall of communism, and the rise of democracy; and now we are witnessing the fall of democracy... the theme of the evolution of life continues, sweeping away with it all that does not blossom into perfection. (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)
When politicians deny anything fiercely, there is a good chance that it will happen. (Semir Zeki)
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