bunch of fat, stupid, ugly old ladies that watch soap operas, play bingo, read tabloids and donât know the metric system.
Tom Alcieri on his election as a Republican member of the New Hampshire state legislature
Democracy has been served â 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 âDonât touch me, you will make me dirtyâ.
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.
PÃo Baroja
When a politician changes his position itâs 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 â bread and circuses.
Juvenal, Satires
Without exaggerating, the minersâ 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 ainât nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos.
Texan politician on âmiddle of the roadâ 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 1968â74
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 treeâs a tree.