Law and Politics

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate, in Law and Politics

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Honoré de Balzac, in Law and Politics

We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

John Perry Barlow, in Law and Politics

No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.

Lyman Beecher, in Law and Politics and Science and Religion

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not the opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed the same kind.

George Bernard, in Law and Politics and Life and Death

Even Napoleon had his Watergate.

Yogi Berra, (on Frenchmen in American politics), in Law and Politics

Accuse: To affirm another's guilt or unworth; most commonly as a justification of ourselves for having wronged them.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, in Law and Politics

Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted into each others' pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, in Law and Politics and War and Peace

Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, in Law and Politics

In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary, "patriotism" is defined as the last resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.

Ambrose Bierce, in Law and Politics

Vote: The instrument and symbol of a free man's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, in Law and Politics

To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.

Otto von Bismarck, in Law and Politics

Nowadays it's not as important for voters to know what a politician has done as what he or she hasn't done.

Edward Blakeman, in Law and Politics

The people must fight for their laws as for their walls.

Heraclitus, in Law and Politics

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.

Edouard Herriot, (from Politicians and Other Scoundrels by Ferdinand Lundberg), in Law and Politics

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see Paradise as Hell; and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as Paradise.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, in Law and Politics

What luck for the rulers that men do not think.

Adolf Hitler, in Law and Politics

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Law and Politics

Justice is incidental to law and order.

J. Edgar Hoover, in Law and Politics

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

Oscar Ameringer, (from Politicians and Other Scoundrels by Ferdinand Lundberg), in Law and Politics