Political Fragility Quotes

You can't ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.

I am aware of the fragility of good political institutions. I never take them for granted. I am always attentive to the ways in which, particularly, collective ideologies of purity -- be it religious purity, racial purity, or national purity -- can go wrong.

States with shallow domestic legitimacy tend to fail when they lose foreign support.

In many emerging democracies, democracy and stability are mutually incompatible.

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

[Spiro] Agnew was a small-time pol who became the most blatant crook to sit one heartbeat away from the presidency. He was a demagogue ranting ghost-written bile that split Americans amid the war and fires of the '60s. But political peers, sensing in Agnew's tumble their own fragility, always treated Spiro as gently as a museum vase.

We in the West walked away from Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War and left it as a country devastated socially and armed to the teeth. If we do that again, there will be consequences.

Germany has become the economic heart of Europe because our leaders are weak.

It was a storm in a tea cup, but in politics we sail in paper boats.

If an angel should be winged from Heaven, on an errand of mercy to our country, the first accents that would glow on his lips would be, Beware! Be cautious! You have everything to lose; nothing to gain. We live under the only government that ever existed which was framed by the unrestrained and deliberate consultations of the people. Miracles do not cluster. That which has happened but once in six thousand years cannot be expected to happen often. Such a government, once gone, might leave a void, to be filled, for ages, with revolution and tumult, riot and despotism.

While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile.

For not only every democracy, but certainly every republic, bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

My view is that we're entering into a situation of enormous instability, insecurity, fragility.

I think some people have blind faith in American institutions without knowing a whole lot about them and think they will stand up to Donald Trump and are indestructible. I actually think democracy is not a definable and achievable state. Any country is either becoming more democratic or less democratic. I think the United States hasn't tended to its journey toward democracy in a long time. It's been becoming less democratic, and right now it's in danger of becoming drastically less democratic.