Storm Jameson Quotes

How is it possible for those who are men of honor in their persons, thus to become notorious liars in their party

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.

A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.

The connection between humbug and politics is too long established to be challenged.

Men say that I am a saint losing myself in politics. The fact is that I am a politician trying my hardest to be a saint.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

Formerly, leaders of states practiced realism, but did not honor it. With them morality was violated, but moral notions remained intact. The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality.

Honor is the only really good disguise for an occasional act of dishonor.

To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.

A lot of times in politics you have people look you in the eye and tell you what's not on their mind.

Hypocrisy itself does great honor, or rather justice, to religion, and tacitly acknowledges it to be an ornament to human nature. The hypocrite would not be at so much pains to put on the appearance of virtue, if he did not know it was the most proper and effectual means to gain the love and esteem of mankind.

A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

There is no perfecter endowment in man than political virtue.

I don't know a lot about politics. I like talking about human behavior. Politicians are funny to me because they often say one thing and behave a different way.

It is curious that we pay statesmen for what they say, not for what they do; and judge of them from what they do, not from what they say. Hence they have one code of maxims for profession and another for practice, and make up their consciences as the Neapolitans do their beds, with one set of furniture for show and another for use.

Everyone seems to be running against a liar, but nobody seems to be one. Odd - I mean, the math doesn't work out.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time.

I have seen in the Halls of Congress more idealism, more humanness, more compassion, more profiles of courage than in any other institution that I have ever known.

That statesman is indeed happy who can count as his friends the really honest and consistent, the true Patriots, and the men of honorable thought.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

Well, when I was a kid, if my father was witnessing something that he thought was particularly outrageous or he was looking at some sort of a question that he thought lacked proper definition, he would say, Well, at least Jesse James had the honor to wear a mask.

The statesman shears the sheep; the politician skins them.

I think Ralph Nader is the biggest liar in American politics when he said it didn't matter who was president.