Political Theory Quotes

“I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.”
― Machiavelli Niccolo

“Only a psychopath would ever think of doing these things, only a psychopath would dream of abusing other people in such a way, only a psychopath would treat people as less than human just for money. The shocking truth is, even though they now have most if not all of the money, they want still more, they want all of the money that you have left in your pockets, they want it all because they have no empathy with other people, with other creatures, they have no feeling for the world which they exploit, they have no love or sense of being or belonging for their souls are dead, dead to all things but greed and a desire to rule over others.”
― Arun D. Ellis, Corpalism

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
― Carl Schmitt

“We are all born to love people and use things. Unfortunately, we grow to love things and use people...”
― T. Rafael Cimino

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.”
― Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty

“There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit.”
― Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed

“Property breeds lawyers, I said, forbearing to add a belief that unfortunately property now seemed the only thing palpable enough to demand the respect of governments, and perhaps was the generating clout against encroachments on the spiritual protections for speech, assembly, and so on. It might turn out that without the right to possess we are not sure we really have the right to speak and to be.”
― Arthur Miller, Salesman in Beijing

“Leadership has never been an exact science. But it has always found itself particularly challenged when tasked with elevating one segment of a society onto a level more politically, socially, and economically equitable with another.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“Zweifellos kommt keine demokratische Republik ohne Vertrauen in ihre gewählten Repräsentanten und in das Funktionieren ihrer Institutionen aus. Vertrauen aber wird im Selbstverständnis eines republikanischen Staatswesens stets komplementär zu Partizipation gedacht; sobald es an deren Stelle tritt, gerät die Architektur jeder Demokratie aus den Fugen. […] Macht voraussetzungslos und im Vertrauen auf die guten Absichten der Machthaber zu delegieren, lässt dem Ehrgeiz weniger auf Kosten aller freie Bahn.”
― Bernd Greiner, 11. September. Der Tag, die Angst, die Folgen

“Nationalism is incoherent in theory, illiberal in practice, and, I fear, often idolatrous in our hearts.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“The march of GOD in the world, that is what the state is.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

“So Marxism, for all its plurality, has been marked by the interplay of theoretical and political preoccupations. It has also been punctuated by widely perceived moments of internal crisis – starting in the late 1890s with the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s Preconditions of Socialism, but again during the First World War, in the 1930s, and at the end of the 1970s. Indeed, one of us has written, “Marxism is constitutively, from Marx’s contribution onwards, . . . crisis theory” (Kouvelakis 2005, 25). Perhaps there are two main reasons for this succession of crises. First, Marxism is inherently tied to capitalism, at once the object of the critique of political economy and an enemy to be vanquished. But since, as Marx and Engels showed in the Communist Manifesto, it is also a dynamic system constantly transforming itself, Marxism constantly falls victim to the anxiety that it is not adequate to its Protean antagonist, that it must run to keep up with the metamorphoses of bourgeois society. This is then connected to a second source of anxiety, namely that capitalism continues to exist, and that therefore the communist project remains unrealized, two centuries now after Marx’s birth.”
― Alex Callinicos Stathis Kouvelakis Lucia Pradella

“Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of
labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual
character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He
becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most
simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is
required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is
restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he
requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his
race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of
labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion
therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage
decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and
division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden
of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working
hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by
increased speed of the machinery, etc.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Wars are not started by soldiers but by politicians who have never fought them.”
― Samuel R. Young Jr.

“Simply put, democracy is viewed exclusively as a set of principles of government that, like the grammar of a language, can be delineated, taught, and applied so that when uttered, it will sound the same regardless of habits of reading or listening.

This trend towards a grammatical and linguistic common sense also finds expression in theoretical de- bates about normativity and deontology in contemporary liberalism.”
― Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation

“Crises of every kind — economic crises more frequently, but not only these — in their turn increase very considerably the tendency towards concentration and monopoly.”
― Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

“The demographic character of India is such that whereas the Hindus think they belong to it, the Muslims feel it belongs to them and the Christians want to own it in time.”
― B.S. Murthy

“Governments supposedly represent the people and thus what the government does the people naturally are inclined to support. The alternative, in theory, would be to ask people to oppose the will of themselves.”
― Aviel Oppenheim, Ethics of Vaccine Passports: A Poor Bargain

“Don't strive to be a great politician, but strive to be a great leader — the rewards will be far greater.”
― Vikrant Adams

“Behind the facade of elected government are the leaders of industry.”
― Steven Magee

“Voting is about choosing the party that most reflects your current values.”
― Steven Magee

“The interests of the consumer of any commodity whatsoever should always prevail over the interests of the producer.”
― Gustave de Molinari, The Production of Security

“One of the claims to a special status in democratic government, it seemed to me, was being made by those creating the literature of public administration - a claim more or less obscured by a language of "public service" and "civil servant.”
― Dwight Waldo, The Administrative State: A Study of the Political Theory of American Public Administration

“I confess in some contexts ignorance can seem a virtue.”
― Dwight Waldo, The Administrative State: A Study of the Political Theory of American Public Administration

“Althusius is simply Rushdoony plus 500 years.”
― Douglas Wilson

“The Constitution is the document that prevents the government from doing all the terrible things it does.”
― Butler Shaffer

“We have no right to expect of the classical Marxist writers, separated as they were from our day by a period of forty-five or fifty-five years, that they should have foreseen each and every zigzag of history in the distant future in every separate country. It would be ridiculous to expect that the classical Marxist writers should have elaborated for our benefit readymade solutions for each and every theoretical problem that might arise in any particular country fifty or one hundred years afterwards, so that we, the descendants of the classical Marxist writers, might calmly doze at the fireside and munch ready-made solutions.”
― Joseph Stalin

“Most people can see that dictators are not extraordinary people in any way, yet they are credited with single-handedly assembling and upholding tyrannies.”
― Heather Marsh, How to Dismantle a Dictatorship