83 Memorable Political Quotes

In the vast arena of political discourse, a single statement can resonate through generations, ignite movements, or encapsulate the spirit of an era. From stirring speeches to poignant proclamations, political quotes have the power to inspire, challenge, and provoke thought. As we journey through history's most unforgettable utterances, this collection of the top 83 memorable political quotes brings together the words that have left an indelible mark on the fabric of society. Whether they come from leaders who changed the world or moments that sparked transformation, these quotes encapsulate the potent legacy of political rhetoric. Dive into this carefully curated repository and rediscover the powerful force of language in shaping our world.

1. “It does no service to the cause of racial equality for white people to content themselves with judging themselves to be nonracist. Few people outside the clan or skinhead movements own up to all-out racism these days. White people must take the extra step. They must become anti-racist.” - Clarence Page

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

3. “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” - James Madison

4. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” - George Orwell

5. “It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.” - Robert Anton Wilson

6. “A bright man of conviction and action is a beacon to his country,but a flash light to the scurrying of inaction, ego, and insecurity of lesser men.” - Daniel S. Green

7. “If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” - Jonah Goldberg

8. “Let the revolution begin.” - Ron Paul

9. “Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.” - Herbert Hoover

10. “A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank.” - Ron Paul

11. “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

12. “It is a confession of the weakness of our own faith in the righteousness of our cause when we attempt to suppress by law those who do not agree with us."Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York after WWI” - Alfred E. Smith

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

14. “To the union of all honest men.” - Aaron Burr

15. “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

16. “We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words ‘Too Late’.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

17. “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

18. “Truth is commodity in political consumption.” - Toba Beta

19. “States' rights, as our forefathers conceived it, was a protection of the right of the individual citizen. Those who preach most frequently about states' rights today are not seeking the protection of the individual citizen, but his exploitation. . . . The time is long past - if indeed it ever existed - when we should permit the noble concept of States' rights to be betrayed and corrupted into a slogan to hide the bald denial of American rights, of civil rights, and of human rights.” - Robert Kennedy

20. “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

21. “Do you work for the government, any government?”"I pay taxes, which means I work for the government, part of the time. Yes.” - Roger Zelazny

22. “[spurious quotation].” - Joseph Stalin

23. “وطن السر الذى يطلع منى خطوتى تاريخه رأسى فضا أنجمه لحمى علامات التخومو ....أمد الجسر حتى يقتلونى ...” - محمد عفيفي مطر

24. “power the mojave desert with miles & miles of solar panels!” - joy leftow

25. “Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American.” - Malcolm X

26. “Maybe I`m getting to the age when I`m starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now. You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot - both on the Right and the Left. ” - Clint Eastwood

27. “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

28. “I turned to books for comfort.” - Laura Bush

29. “The search for scapegoats is essentially an abnegation of responsibility: it indicates an inability to assess honestly and intelligently the true nature of the problems which lie at the root of social and economic difficulties and a lack of resolve in grappling with them.” - Aung San Suu Kyi

30. “I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.” - John Kenneth Galbraith

31. “Ultimately amorality is immorality.” - Roger M. Keesing

32. “Now this was one of the things I had been brought up to eschew like disgrace; it being held by my father neither the part of a Christian nor yet of a gentleman to set his own livelihood and fish for that of others, on the cast of painted pasteboard.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

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

34. “There is nothing we can now call our own, for what we call so is the effect of art; crimes are made by decrees of the senate, or by the votes of the people; and as here-to-fore we are burdened by vices, so now we are oppressed by laws.” - Blaise Pascal

35. “It's easier to run a revolution than a government.” - Ferdinand Marcos

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

37. “أنا لاأعتقد أن هناك دولة عظمى ستظهر بعد أمريكا ، إنما سيكون عالم متعدد الأقطاب مثل الصين واليابان وأوربا ،ومن يدري؟ فربما يكون العرب إحدى القوى السياسية في العالم.” - عبد الوهاب المسيري

38. “The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty."[Beauharnais v.Illinois, 342 U.S. 250, 287 (1952) (dissenting)]” - William O. Douglas

39. “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

40. “You cannot take away freedom to protect it, you cannot destroy the free market to save it, and you cannot uphold freedom of speech by silencing those with whom you disagree. To take rights away to defend them or to spend your way out of debt defies common sense.” - Glenn Beck

41. “The federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.” - Ronald Reagan

42. “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

43. “It is only on the battlefield of ideas that the best ones can be recognized and ultimately prevail. Only those afraid of the truth seek to silence debate, intimidate those with whom they disagree, or slander their ideological counterparts. Those who know they are right have no reason to stifle debate because they realize that all opposing arguments will ultimately be overcome by fact.” - Glenn Beck

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

45. “Democrats and Republicans were essentially the same party with different faces and that was why, no matter how many promises each leader made, significant change rarely transpired.” - James Morcan, Lance Morcan

46. “His deepest need was that people should like him. An admirable trait that; in a spaniel. Or a whore.” - Michael Dobbs

47. “You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the state.” - Muhammad Ali Jinnah

48. “No settlement with the majority is possible as no Hindu leader speaking with any authority shows any concern or genuine desire for it.” - Muhammad Ali Jinnah

49. “I sincerely hope that they (relations between India and Pakistan) will be friendly and cordial. We have a great deal to do...and think that we can be of use to each other and to the world.” - Muhammad Ali Jinnah

50. “La más común y duradera fuente de fraccionamiento ha sido la variada y desigual distribución de la propiedad” - James Madison

51. “To put a trillion dollars in context, if you spend a million dollars every day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spent a trillion.” - Mitch McConnell

52. “Without moral values, which should begin in Congress, America will lose her roots, her basis, her thesis.” - Janine Turner

53. “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

54. “In essence I find that the foundation of modern conservatism is driven by a clinging to God in fear of the world, whereas the foundation of modern liberalism is a clinging to the world in fear of God; albeit, the true foundation should be one's clinging to God in fear of God.” - Criss Jami

55. “The law is too important to be left to the lawyers, to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau about war and generals. We laymen know too little about our Constitution and think too superficially about its influence on the qualities of American life. Civic duty requires more.” - David K. Shipler

56. “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

57. “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

58. “One of the prerogatives of American citizenship is the right to criticize public men and measures, and that means not only informed and responsible criticism but the freedom to speak foolishly and without moderation.” - Felix Frankfurter of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1944.

59. “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

60. “A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.” - Isabel Paterson

61. “Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.” - Ayn Rand

62. “I think all artists struggle to represent the geometryof life in their own way, just like writers deal witharchetypes. There are only so many stories that you cantell, but an infinite number of storytellers.” - Henry Mosquera

63. “There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above.” - Richard K Morgan

64. “Two of the greatest hungers in our world today are the hunger for spirituality and the hunger for social change. The connection between the two is the one the world is waiting for, especially the new generation. And the first hunger will empower the second.” - Jim Wallis

65. “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

66. “Zionist willingness to compromise met by Palestinian rejection and Jew hatred.” - Sol Stern

67. “...British appeasement of the Palestinian Arabs led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews [in the Holocaust] who might otherwise have found refuge in Palestine.” - Sol Stern

68. “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

69. “A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.” - Mary Louise Cecilia "Texas" Guinan

70. “Have a smile on your face for everyone you meet, and a plan to kill them.” - Brad Thor

71. “Lord X was a tyrant, not a revolutionary. He wanted to take over the system, not change it.” - Lois McMaster Bujold

72. “En cambio, la fortuna política es un largo orgasmo, querido. El éxito tiene que ser mediato y lento en llegar para ser duradero. Un largo orgasmo, querido.” - Carlos Fuentes

73. “You are the posterity of your family. You are either continuing the progression or regression of your ancestors.” - Johnnie Dent Jr.

74. “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

75. “The jobs in the greatest demand in the future don't yet exist and will require workers to use technologies that have not yet been invented to solve problems that we don't yet even know are problems.” - Gavin Newsom

76. “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

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

78. “What a country of lazy shits, with fucking hypocritical politicians claiming that people actually wanted to work if they could. Norwegians voted for the Socialist Party because it made it a human right to shirk their jobs, and who the hell wouldn't vote for a party that gave you three days off without a doctor's note, gave you carte blanche to sit at home and jerk off or go skiing or recover from a hangover? The Socialist Party knew, of course, what a perk this was, but still tried to appear responsible, preened themselves with their "trust in most people" and declared the right to malinger as some kind of social reform. The Progress Party was even more fucking infuriating, buying itself votes with tax cuts and hardly bothering to conceal the fact.” - Jo Nesbø

79. “La politica, se fatta a viso aperto e cuore sincero, è una sfida che vale la pena giocare, un’esperienza difficile ma meravigliosa” - Matteo Renzi

80. “Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship.” - Aristotle

81. “If your desire is for good, the people will be good.” - Confucius

82. “It's a shame, when I'm at the checkout line, and the cashier holds up my bill to the light, in search for a ghost president, or slashing a yellow marker to see if counterfeit. Even in money we can't be trusted. Makes we wonder whats next, will the government make a marker to slash our hand, or an x-ray we will have to walk through, to check if we have a dishonest heart or corrupt spirit?” - Anthony Liccione

83. “The triune God exercises total government over all things, and He requires us as His image-bearers to exercise government in Christ in our own spheres in terms of His law.” - R.J. Rushdoony