43 Political Quotes To Inspire

In the realm of politics, words wield immense power. They can ignite social movements, inspire nations, and shape the course of history. Whether delivered from the podium of a grand assembly or penned in quiet reflection, political quotes have the unique ability to distill complex ideas into poignant, impactful statements. In this collection, we have curated the top 43 political quotes that transcend time and geography, offering wisdom and inspiration from some of the most influential figures in political history. Join us on this journey through words that echo with the enduring spirit of leadership and the relentless pursuit of justice.

1. “The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free...” - Utah Phillips

2. “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” - John Stuart Mill

3. “The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages. What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey? But I am done with this creed of corruption. I am done with the monster of "We," the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: "I.” - Ayn Rand

4. “Everyone should have health insurance? I say everyone should have health care. I'm not selling insurance.” - Dennis Kucinich

5. “Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damages morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hung” - Abraham Lincoln

6. “The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced.” - Frank Zappa

7. “In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.” - Naomi Klein

8. “History teaches usthat men and nationsonly behave wiselyonce they have exhaustedall other alternatives."--” - Abba Eban

9. “To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

10. “Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle.” - Paulo Freire

11. “I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.” - David Sedaris

12. “We have very little faith in the Lord, very little trust. If we trusted the Lord as much as we trust a friend when we ask him to do something for us, neither we as individuals nor our whole country would suffer so much.” - Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

13. “I have always been afraid of banks.” - Andrew Jackson

14. “And in heaven's name, who are the public enemies?" exclaimed Dr. Leete. "Are they France, England Germany or hunger, cold and nakedness?” - Edward Bellamy

15. “The health care bill is nothing about health care- it's about controlling the people.” - David Lincoln

16. “We believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much.” - James Hilton

17. “The greatest threat to our Constitution is our own ignorance of it.” - Jacob F. Roecker

18. “You can't condemn a whole group of people because of the actions of a few.” - Justin Somper

19. “Because I was single, there was a chance I was a homosexual. Because I went to Syracuse, wherever that was, then I was probably a Communist. Or worse, a Liberal. Because I was from Memphis, I was a subversive intent on embarrassing Ford County.” - John Grisham

20. “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.” - Audre Lorde

21. “Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.” - Tobias Wolff

22. “Pops added,"you know, they say if you don't vote, you get the government you deserve.""And if you do, you never get the results you expected," (Katherine) replied.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

23. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” - Isaac Asimov

24. “Ha de decirse que para el científico, como convicción primigenia e indecible, hay una línea divisoria muy nítida entre la realidad del mundo que sucede y acaece con total prescindencia de lo que pueda hacerse o moldearse, y la realidad del mundo que se presta a la acción, al arte o al conjuro. Esto es, hay cosas que se dan u ocurren por sí mismas, cosas de naturaleza cabría decir, y cosas que pueden producirse o prevenirse a voluntad. Sin la actitud que envuelve esta convicción, debe afirmarse, no hay lugar para el conocimiento científico, independientemente de que el destino de ese conocimiento al final sea servirle de fundamento al desarrollo de eficientes técnicas para la acción o la manipulación.” - Asdrubal Baptista

25. “There are many ways to honor America. This book is mine. I have completed this journey of self-education in the belief that the most terrifying possibility since 9/11 has not been terrorism--as frightening as that is--but the prospect that Americans will give up their rights in pursuing the chimera of security.” - David K. Shipler

26. “The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had secured control of taxation and therefore of government; even when the menace of dynastic conflicts had receded in to the coloured past; even when kingship had ceased to be transcendental and had become one of many alternative institutional forms; the principle of hereditary Monarchy continued to furnish the State with certain specific and inimitable advantages.Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole. Consecrated as he is to the service of his peoples, he possesses a religious sanction and is regarded as someone set apart from ordinary mortals. In an epoch of change, he remains the symbol of continuity; in a phase of disintegration, the element of cohesion; in times of mutability, the emblem of permanence. Governments come and go, politicians rise and fall: the Crown is always there. A legitimate Monarch moreover has no need to justify his existence, since he is there by natural right. He is not impelled as usurpers and dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a succession of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or by the invention of external dangers. The appeal of hereditary Monarchy is to stability rather than to change, to continuity rather than to experiment, to custom rather than to novelty, to safety rather than to adventure.The Monarch, above all, is neutral. Whatever may be his personal prejudices or affections, he is bound to remain detached from all political parties and to preserve in his own person the equilibrium of the realm. An elected President – whether, as under some constitutions, he be no more than a representative functionary, or whether, as under other constitutions, he be the chief executive – can never inspire the same sense of absolute neutrality. However impartial he may strive to become, he must always remain the prisoner of his own partisan past; he is accompanied by friends and supporters whom he may seek to reward, or faced by former antagonists who will regard him with distrust. He cannot, to an equal extent, serve as the fly-wheel of the State.” - Harold Nicholson

27. “Italy has been made; now it remains to make Italians” - Massimo D'Azeglio

28. “What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.” - Edward Langley

29. “With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.” - Eric Metaxas

30. “It is better to recognise that we are in darkness than to pretend that we can see the light.” - Hedley Bull

31. “The dictatorship is like an aria that never becomes an opera.” - Emilia Pardo Bazán

32. “السادات الذي كان في بدايه عهده بالرئاسة يقضي نهاية الأسبوع في قرية " ميت أبو الكوم " مسقط رأسه، بجلبابه البلدي هو نفسه السادات الذي إنتهي به الأمر إلي أن يفكر في أن يرتدي الزي الفرعوني ويستقل عربة فرعونية إلي الأهرامات وأبو الهول! ملكاً فرعونياً يتهادي طالطاووس !!” - إمام عبد الفتاح إمام

33. “You can't believe that AIDS is a curse from God against Gays without accepting that Lyme Disease is a curse from the same God against Deer Hunters...” - T. Rafael Cimino

34. “The Zionists accepted the partition plan. The AHC and the Arab states rejected any proposal to share the land and vowed to drown the fledging Jewish state in rivers of blood.” - Sol Stern

35. “This Obamacare thing really scares me. The United States government / politicians are trying to turn the American people into a brand X “One size fits all” country. The past ten years has been very grim for Americans. Our current state is very grim. Our future is even more grim than ever. I used to tell people that it will get worse before it gets better. Now, I just say it will get worse.” - Carroll Bryant

36. “Prolific irony - For 8 years, the finger on the button that could end the world belonged to a president who couldn't pronounce the word "nuclear.” - T. Rafael Cimino

37. “Y yo pregunto a los economistas políticos, a los moralistas, si han calculado el número de individuos que es necesario condenar a la miseria, al trabajo desproporcionado, a la infancia desamparada, a la ignorancia crapulosa, a la desgracia invencible, a la penuria absoluta, para producir un rico.” - Almeida Garrett

38. “Steadiness of faith, was, in the long run, as illuminating and essential as sophistication of thought.” - Jon Meacham

39. “I turned on Fox News and jumped when I saw that they had one of those things in their studio. "Are you people crazy?" I screamed at the television. "Get out of there. Somebody shoot it!" Then I realized I was watching Special Report and had mistaken Charles Krauthammer for a zombie.” - Ian McClellan

40. “The men and women of England who abolished slavery, created the educational system, or gave women the vote were not acting on the hypotheses of what the voters wanted. They were afire with faith in what people ought to want and in the end they persuaded their lethargic compatriots to give them enough support to warrant a change.” - Geoffrey Vickers

41. “Las ideologías son prisiones mentales que producen ceguera.” - Fernando Araya

42. “We do not get to vote on who owns what, or on relations in factory and so on, for all this is deemed beyond the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one can actually change things by "extending" democracy to ple's control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal "rights", etcetera: no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, unless this is understood, the solution sought will involve applying democratic mechanisms (which, of course, can have a positive role to play)- mechanisms, one should never forget, which are themselves part of the apparatus of the "bourgeois" state that guarantees the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. In this precise sense, Badiou hit the mark with his apparently wired claim that "Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy." it is the "democratic illusion" the acceptance of democratic procedures as the sole framework for any possible change, that blocks any radical transformation of capitalist relations.” - Slavoj Žižek

43. “Education is political.” - Noel Castree