Sayre’s law, as summarised by Henry Kissinger
He is undoubtedly living proof that a pig’s bladder on a stick can be elected as a member of parliament.
Tony Banks on fellow MP Terry Dicks
Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.
Charles de Gaulle. Attrib.
A horrible voice, bad breath and a vulgar manner – the characteristics of a popular politician.
Aristophanes
Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign contributions from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.
Edward Bennet Williams, US political campaign organiser
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
George Eliot, Felix Holt
He brings to the fierce struggle of politics the tepid enthusiasm of a lazy summer afternoon at a cricket match.
Aneurin Bevan on Clement Attlee
Reform? Reform? Aren’t things bad enough already?
The Duke of Wellington
Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.
George Burns
It is easier to cancel a nuclear submarine than a civil servant’s parking space.
Simon Jenkins
One fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
Robert Kennedy
It’s a sure sign of political backwardness when any movement is led by students.
A.J.P. Taylor
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually deteriorates into a racket.
Eric Hoffer
Kill your enemies with cream.
Peter Mandelson’s favourite saying
The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put make-up on two faces.
Maureen Murphy
It is now known … that men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.
Cyril Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatred.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Politicians can forgive almost anything in the way of abuse; they can forgive subversion, revolution, being contradicted, exposed as liars, even ridiculed, but they can never forgive being ignored.
Auberon Waugh, in the Observer
For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
Winston Churchill
Under every stone lurks a politician.
Aristophanes
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
George W. Bush on the welfare state
Our human stock is threatened … These mothers … single parents from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births. If we do nothing the nation moves towards degeneration.
Sir Keith Joseph, Conservative politician. The speech ended his hope of leadership.
For every difficult intractable problem there’s a solution that’s neat, plausible and wrong.
H.L. Mencken
Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Would that the Roman people had one neck!
Gaius Caesar, commonly known as Caligula
I was elected by a bunch of fat, stupid, ugly old ladies that watch soap operas, play bingo, read tabloids and don’t know the metric system.
Tom Alcieri on his election as a Republican member of the New Hampshire state legislature
Democracy has been served – the people have spoken, (sotto voce) the bastards.
Wendell Willkie on hearing of his defeat by President Roosevelt
There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.
Anthony Trollope
Democracy is the process by which people choose who to blame.
Bertrand Russell
Democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you.
Thomas Carlyle
Athenian democracy is destroying itself because it taught its citizens to regard disrespect as a right, lawlessness as a liberty, impertinence as equality and anarchy as enjoyment.
Socrates
Drop dead, you little cretin.
Nicolas Sarkozy after a man rejected his handshake in a crowd and shouted ‘Don’t touch me, you will make me dirty’.
A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing but as a group decide nothing can be done.
Fred Allen
The broad mass of a nation … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
That garrulous monk.
Benito Mussolini on Adolf Hitler
A group is always more easily deceived than an individual.
Pío Baroja
When a politician changes his position it’s sometimes hard to tell whether he has seen the light or felt the heat.
Robert Fuoss
Oratory: the art of making deep noises from the chest sound like important messages from the brain.
H.I. Phillips
Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, order more tunnel.
John Quinton, a banker
Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by which they have once won office.
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society
In a dying civilisation, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician but of the man with the best bedside manner.
Eric Ambler
A common definition of gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.
Alexander Chancellor
Well, you might try getting crucified and rising again on the third day.
Talleyrand on what might impress the French peasantry
Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.
Immanuel Kant, Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht
The people long eagerly for just two things – bread and circuses.
Juvenal, Satires
Without exaggerating, the miners’ leaders were the stupidest men in England, had we not had frequent occasion to meet the mine owners.
Lord Birkenhead
Two kinds of government chair correspond with the two kinds of minister: one sort folds up instantly and the other sort goes round and round.
Sir Humphrey Appleby, the fictional senior civil servant, in Yes, Prime Minister
The urge to pass new laws must be seen as an illness, not much different from the urge to bite old women.
Auberon Waugh
There ain’t nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos.
Texan politician on ‘middle of the road’ politics
Consensus: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes.
Margaret Thatcher
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
Dante
I prefer the cacophony of the playground to the tortured prose of Whitehall but both answer to a need: that of a child to say something and a bureaucrat to say nothing.
Simon Jenkins
The business of the Civil Service is the orderly management of decline.
William Armstrong, Head of the Civil Service 1968–74
Guidelines for bureaucrats: (1) When in charge, ponder; (2) When in trouble, delegate; (3) When in doubt, mumble.
James H. Boren
A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on
this Earth.
Ronald Reagan
A tree’s a tree. How many do you need to look at?
Ronald Reagan on plans to expand California’s Redwood National Park 1967
Saying sorry is becoming fashionable … because it’s something government can do without raising taxes.
Joe Rogaly
A diplomat … is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.
Caskie Stinnett
Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice Doggie’ until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers
The great Unwashed.
Lord Henry Brougham. Attrib.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Kris Kristofferson, American actor and singer
I have more than once pointed out that no organisation with ‘liberation’ in its title has ever, or ever will, liberate anyone or anything.
Bernard Levin
Watching the eurozone countries trying to resolve their debt crisis has been like watching 17 people in oven gloves manipulating a Rubik’s cube.
John Lichfield
The only person alive actually famed for his obscurity.
Hugo Rifkind on Herman Van Rompuy, first President of the European Council
All the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.
Nigel Farage on Herman Van Rompuy
I believe there is something out there watching over us. Unfortunately it’s the government.
Woody Allen
Left and Right
Welcome to Britain’s New Political Order. No passion … No Right. No Left. Just multi-hued blancmange.
Austin Mitchell
The facile leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence.
Karl Marx on Jeremy Bentham
The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.
Irving Berlin on Karl Marx
The left always has an orgasm when it sees a crowd.
Simon Jenkins
The voice of the discontented wealthy.
Nick Cohen on Russell Brand
You can read Russell Brand’s autobiography and dismiss it as rubbish, if you like. Or you can dismiss it as rubbish without reading it, to save time.
Stewart Lee
I couldn’t see him overthrowing a table of drinks.
Noel Gallagher on Russell Brand
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
George Orwell
An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it.
Don Marquis
We should have had socialism in this country long ago, if it were not for the bloody people who became socialists.
George Bernard Shaw
Conservative ideal of freedom and progress: everyone to have an unfettered opportunity of remaining exactly where they are.
Geoffrey Madan
That dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.
George Orwell on left-wing intellectuals
I would rather consult my valet than the Conservative conference.
Arthur Balfour
My son is 22 years old. If he had not become a communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a communist at 30, I will do it then.
Georges Clemenceau
There are lots of ways to get socialism, but I think trying to fracture the Labour party by incessant contest cannot be one of them.
Neil Kinnock
We know that the organised workers of the country are our friends. As for the rest, they don’t matter a tinker’s cuss.
Emanuel Shinwell, Labour politician
My epitaph must be: ‘Died of writing inane letters to empty-headed Conservative Associations’. It is a miserable death to look forward to.
Lord Salisbury
They are political Calibans on Prospero’s island, chanting their subversive songs only to each other.
Jenny McCartney on the Left
After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
Jack London on strikebreakers
The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.
Oscar Wilde
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned how to walk forward.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Why do Republicans hate gay marriage so much? They certainly don’t hate gay prostitutes.
Margaret Cho
Its relationship to democratic institutions is that of the death-watch-beetle – it is not a Party, it is a conspiracy.
Aneurin Bevan on the Communist Party
Russian communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.
Clement Attlee
I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.
Catherine the Great. Attrib.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt
Russia is a collapse, not a revolution.
D.H. Lawrence
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind it only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka
It would have been better if the experiment had been conducted in some small country, to make it clear it was a Utopian idea.
Boris Yeltsin on Communism
The Party line is that there is no Party line.
Milovan Djilas on reforms to the Yugoslavian Communist Party
It is a Party shackled by tradition; all the cautious people, all the timid, all the unimaginative, belong to it. It stumbles slowly and painfully from precedent to precedent with its eyes fixed on the ground.
Lord Salisbury on the Conservative Party
We will bury you.
Nikita Khrushchev at a Kremlin reception
A pig-eyed bag of wind.
Frank L. Howley on Nikita Khrushchev
When you are skinning your customers, you should leave some on to grow so that you can skin them again.
Nikita Khrushchev to British businessmen
No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical and social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party … So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Aneurin Bevan
I Told You So You Fucking Fools.
Kingsley Amis’s suggested name change for a republication of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror. Conquest had been attacked by the left as a Cold War propagandist at the time of the original publication.
The Pope! How many divisions has he got?
Joseph Stalin, when urged by Pierre Lavel to tolerate Catholicism in the USSR to appease the Pope
The most eminent mediocrity in the party.
Leon Trotsky on Joseph Stalin
Pathological exhibits … human scum … paranoiacs, degenerates, morons, bludgers … pack of dingoes … industrial outlaws and political lepers … ratbags. If these people went to Russia, Stalin wouldn’t even use them for manure.
Arthur Calwell, Australian Minister of Immigration, on Australian Communists
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
Brazilian archbishop Hélder Câmara
That all men are equal is a proposition to which a
t ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies
To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don’t feel worse. That’s the ineffectual liberal’s problem in a nutshell.
Michael Frayn
Wonderful theory, wrong species.
Biologist E.O. Wilson on Marxism
Stupid asses.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the proletariat, private correspondence
If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work, which was written only for them and for their sakes to be completed they would perhaps show a little more interest.
Jenny Marx, frustrated by the lack of attention given to the publication of her husband’s magnum opus, Das Kapital.
The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
Margaret Thatcher
‘To borrow and to borrow and to borrow’ is not Macbeth with a heavy cold: it is Labour Party policy.
Margaret Thatcher
Communism is the longest path from capitalism to capitalism.
Russian joke
It is too early to say.
Zhou Enlai, 20th-century Chinese Party Chairman, asked for his assessment of the 1789 French Revolution. But he may have thought the question was about revolutionary French students.
An ideological movement is a collection of people, many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world.
Professor Kenneth Minogue
I’ve been married to one Marxist and one fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.
Actor Lee Grant
British Politics
What shall we do with this bauble? There, take it away.
Oliver Cromwell, dismissing Parliament, 1653
SIR,
I have received your letter with indignation and with scorn return you this answer … I scorn your proffer; I disdain your favour; I abhor your treason; and am so far from delivering up this island to your advantage, that I shall keep it to the utmost of my power, and, I hope, to your destruction. Take this for your final answer, and forbear any further solicitations; for if you trouble me with any more messages of this nature, I will burn your paper, and hang up your messenger.
DERBY
The Earl of Derby, a Royalist holding the Isle of Man, to General Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son in law
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