Political History Quotes

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

In terms of preparation, if there's some historical context that's needed, I do like to read a lot. Working on Joe Kennedy for 'Boardwalk,' I read a couple of biographies on him. It's nice to have a broader context of the man outside of where the show is coming from.

Everything Bill Clinton has done is fair game. He's a former president. I just don't think that is the most effective way to beat Hillary Clinton, because while all that was going on there were a lot of women who felt for whatever reason great sympathy for Hillary Clinton. Look, if my husband were doing that, I would have left him. I would not have behaved the way Hillary Clinton did.

I joined the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) in the early '80s. I'd be in it still but it was wound up at the end of the nineties.

The Republican Party's history is rich and chock full of emancipation and black history.

Fierce nomination fights have been going on since the early days of the Republic …. The founding fathers wanted to avoid a monarchy and instead created anarchy.

The dead cannot speak. But hitherto unknown information has emerged from the confidential archives of the Syrian presidency and foreign ministry, published in a new book by Bouthaina Shaaban, who spent ten years as Hafez's interpreter and is still an adviser to his son Bashar.

In the absence of formal written platforms, the antecedents of candidates become their platforms. On just such platforms all our earlier and better Presidents were elected.

How did the party that elected the first black U.S. senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American congressmen, how did that party become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote?

I've always voted for Franklin Roosevelt for President. My father before me always voted for Franklin Roosevelt for President.

The 2004 Election marks the first time in modern political history that Republican voter turnout matched Democratic turnout in a presidential election year.

I became a prime minister within four-and-a-half years, the shortest kind of career ever in Israeli political history.

These days we think our politics are nasty and partisan. But our discourse looks like a Platonic symposium compared with the vicious fighting that marked the early Republic.

People nowadays don't know about the Cold War and the U.S.'s old rivalry with the U.S.S.R.

History is past politics, and politics present history.

The clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.

I feel like giving myself a pat on the back. We can create history tonight. We can bid goodbye to 10 years of (Liberal-Conservative) government which has ground to a halt, and get a new government and a new majority in Denmark.

Simply as an exercise in efficient politics, Obama '08 rewrote the textbook. His accomplishment was historic and one that transformed how race and politics intersect in our society. Obama is the leading edge of this change, but his success is merely the ripple in a pond that grows deeper every day.

The 2000 election exposed some ugly history in our country.

As a European from a different, younger generation, the trauma that was Nixon's presidency never really had a hold over me. For one thing, I never voted for him.

We were the first constitutionally elected Fascists in England.

I think that the memory of Armenia's genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.

The first phase of American political history was characterized by the conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans, and it resulted in the complete triumph of the latter.

I do not believe as Martin Luther King did, that the arc of history bends towards justice. I see the arc of history bending towards chaos or the unknown.