Free Scorn by Matthew; Parris Page 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 kindsof 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.