Fine Mess

Politics makes strange red-fellows. - Will Rogers

Liberty consists in doing what one desires. - John Stuart Mill

Liberty is never being too sure you're right. - Learned Hand

Those who trade liberty for security have neither. - John Adams

Government is an endless pursuit of new ways to tax. - Unknown

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote. - George Jean Nathan

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance. - Robert Frost

A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top. - James Reston

My favorite romantic comedy is 'When Harry Met Sally.' - Ginnifer Goodwin

World War II was the last government program that really worked. - George Will

There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress. - Mark Twain

You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think. - Milton Berle

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues. - George Will

The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government. - Edward Abbey

Every woman dreams of her own political career and her own place in life. - Raisa M. Gorbachev

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. - Henry Kissinger

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers. - Aristotle

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power. - Jacob Bronowski

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. - H L Mencken

Personally, I'm against political jokes. Too often they get elected to office. - Henny Youngman

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. - Tom Robbins

Of all the tasks of government, the most basic is to protect its citizens from violence. - John Foster Dulles

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy. - Bertrand Russell

Passover affirms the great truth that liberty is the inalienable right of every human being. - Morris Joseph

There are three basic rules for great comedy. Unfortunately no-one can remember what they are. - Arthur Smith

In a democracy, the one thing that cannot be done is to destroy its trust, its hope, its idealism. - Teresa Heinz

Good thing we've still got politics in Texas - finest form of free entertainment ever invented. - Molly Ivins

Ex-Presidents of the United States get state subsidies. Not so in Russia. You get no government support. - Mikhail Gorbachev

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. - E.B. White

Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism. - Claude McKay

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand. - Milton Friedman

Canada's political parties spend a few years in opposition and then govern as if it's permanent payback time. - Bob Rae

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding. - Louis D Brandeis

I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress. - Ronald Reagan

One lesson you better learn if you want to be in politics is that you never go out on a golf course and beat the President. - Lyndon B. Johnson

It was revealed in a government survey published today that the Prime Minister is doing the work of two men, Laurel and Hardy. - Ronnie Corbett

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost. - John Quincy Adams

When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale. - John W. Gardner

Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness. - Aristotle

In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise. - Malcolm Muggeridge