Famous Quotes

"There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word 'freedom' that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all."

Thomas Frank on Politics

More quotes about Politics

• "Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future."

  John F. Kennedy on Politics

• "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress but I repeat myself."

  Mark Twain on Politics

• "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

  Plato on Politics

• "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."

  Milton Friedman on Politics

• "It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

  Joseph Stalin on Politics

More quotes by Thomas Frank

• "We have become a society that can't self-correct, that can't address its obvious problems, that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati - we can't wake up from."

• "Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses."

• "Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense."

• "Former President Bill Clinton, who is widely regarded as a political mastermind, may have sounded like a traditional liberal at the beginning of his term in office. But what ultimately defined his presidency was his amazing pliability on matters of principle."

• "The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace."