The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Every government, whatever its form, character, or color—be it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi, or Bolshevist—is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it.
—Emma Goldman
Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial.
—Tom Robbins
I never vote for anyone; I always vote against.
—W. C. Fields
One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
—Robert F. Kennedy
The only real struggle in the history of the world… is between the vested interest and social justice.
—Arnold Toynbee
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
—G. K. Chesterton
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.… This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of hearts, there remains… an uprooted small corner of evil.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.
—Carl Sagan in Cosmos
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry
Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then—we elected them.
—Lily Tomlin
A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.
—Milton Berle
War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation: thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes… as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to "feel good" about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.
—Adrienne Rich
You may break any written law in America with impunity. There is an unwritten law that you break at your peril. It is: do not attack the profit system.
—Mary Heaton Vorse
The Duke of Cambridge protested that he wasn't arguing against change. He favored it, he said, when there was no alternative.
—Unknown