Scorn (8 page)

 

People, Politicians and Government

In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade.
Ronald Syme

I'm starting to think that the Facebook status update I liked has had absolutely no influence on Government policy at all.
@RogerQuimbly

We have screwed up. Not a little but a lot. No country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have. It can be explained. We have obviously lied throughout the past 18 to 24 months. It was perfectly clear that what we were saying was not true … I almost perished because I had to pretend for 18 months that we were governing. Instead we lied morning, noon and night.
Ferenc Gyurcsány, Hungarian Prime Minister, recorded in a private meeting to his party in 2006. The broadcast caused riots.

It is a peculiarity of our times that we want politicians to be more human, and then, when they screw up, we demand they be more professional.
Ann Treneman

I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.
Frank More Colby

He was a man of splendid abilities but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks.
John Randolph on fellow-US-politician Edward Livingstone

The urge to power is a personality disorder in its own right, like the urge to sexual congress with children or the taste for rubber underwear.
Auberon Waugh

One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and cries lustily, screams and kicks and makes everybody unpleasant until it is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first. That is the whole history of politics.
Emmeline Pankhurst

Generosity is part of my character, and I therefore hasten to assure this Government that I will never make an allegation of
dishonesty against it wherever a simple explanation of stupidity will suffice.
Leslie Lever

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it is important.
Eugene J. McCarthy

If I had known Henry was going to be President I would have sent him to school.
A 19th-century President of Bolivia's mother

There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten.
Indira Gandhi

No party in Ireland is prepared to accept anything except the impossible.
W.E. Gladstone

Sire, I have other sons.
Lord Stanley, at the Battle of Bosworth, having been told by Richard III that his son would be executed if Stanley did not support him

They are nothing else but a load of kippers – two-faced, with no guts.
Eric Heffer on the Conservative Government

A liberal is just a conservative who hasn't been mugged.
Hilton Hamman, South African self-defence expert

A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.
Robert Frost

A liberal is someone whose interests are not threatened at the moment.
Ann Leslie

A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.
Tom Wolfe

Have I said something foolish?
Phocion, to his friend, Diogenes Laertius, after the crowd applauded a point in his speech, 150 BC

First rate men will not canvas mobs: and mobs will not elect first rate men.
Lord Salisbury

The people would be just as noisy if they were going to see me hanged.
Oliver Cromwell, referring to a noisy crowd of admirers

True terror is to wake up one morning and realise that your high school class is running the country.
Kurt Vonnegut

The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you.
Nancy Astor

Far better to keep your mouth shut and let everyone think you're stupid than to open it and leave no doubt.
Norman Tebbit to Dennis Skinner

We had lost the art of communication – but not, alas, the gift of speech.
Gordon Brown, then Shadow Chancellor, on the Labour Party's 1983 election campaign, 1997

The reason academic politics are so bitter is that so little is at stake.
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