Bread and Circuses

The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.

Failure of government programs prompts more determined effort, while the loss of liberty is ignored or rationalized away... whether it is the war on poverty, drugs, terrorism... or the current Hitler...

Josh: So, Toby, it's election night. What do you say about a country that goes out of its way to protect even those citizens that try to destroy it? Toby: God bless America.

Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum. You don't want it back.

They say the crazies come out at night. I say the crazies come out during election year: Elections have the power to turn once seemingly normal people into certified loonies.

The American President has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues. The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make 'em behave. Well, all...

I am firmly convinced that we must never judge political movements by their aims, no matter how loudly proclaimed or how sincerely upheld, but only by the means they use to realize these aims.

She thought you should be able to keep your private life private for any reason or for no reason. She even felt that way about politicians - so long as they weren't hypocrites - and worried that we'd...

Secrecy is like oxygen to politicians and defense forces; there's always got to be some of it to keep them going.

I respect those who say that the United States should simply withdraw from the Middle East, but I don't respect them for anything but their honesty.

They're politicians,' Win said. 'They'd lie and evade if you asked them what they had for breakfast.

Our policy is impossible to justify on rational grounds, which is why we've started invoking national security and other shibboleths.

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.

it's easier finding a virgin in a whorehouse than an honest politician.

Be suspicious of all those who employ the term 'we' or 'us' without your permission. This is a form of surreptitious conscription. Always ask who this 'we' is; as often as not it's an attempt to...

We have entered an age of insecurity - economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity.

These guys are the world's biggest welfare queens, after all - suck up government money in military contracts, use it to issue bonds, get the government to pass laws that make your bonds into safer...

"Listen, Peaches, is what humans are all about," said the voice of Maurice. "They're so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them."

I always had the faith that this country would elect those who knew best, who could follow the best course through any situation.

All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament.

Campaign contributions don't buy votes. What they buy is access.

Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.

The full story, however, is told in Steve Inskeep's recent book Jacksonland, which I will rely on for my subsequent account. "Jackson managed national security affairs in a way that matched his...

People who vote for candidates bought by private business interests are not politically free in any real sense.

The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses.

Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it's "us versus them" in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a...

I feel worse than I have ever done before, because now I know that it is easier to take a country into war than to bring it to live at peace, and a country at war is a bitter place to live, a risky...

When Grant made Edward S. Salomon governor of the Washington Territory, it was the first time an American Jew had occupied a gubernatorial post. When Salomon proved corrupt, Grant handled his case...

In the end he required political pull to do so. After years of wandering, Grant had popped up in the right congressional district in the right state. Lincoln had the power to appoint brigadier...