Free Scorn by Matthew; Parris

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