American Politics Quotes

“This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“A detective in love with a breathtakingly beautiful stripper, who also is a major criminal: “Among her coterie of supplicants was Joe Fucci, a senior detective on the Laughlin force. Joe regarded himself as handsome, and he was. If he went without shaving for three days, a John Deere was required to cut through the growth. No electric razor created by man stood a chance in that tangle of growth.”
― John M. Vermillion, Pack's Posse

“You really do own your illiteracy, don’t you?” “Yeah, I’m thinking about moving to America and running for public office.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“For it is dangerous to attach one's self to the crowd in front, and so long as each one of us is more willing to trust another than to judge for himself, we never show any judgement in the matter of living, but always a blind trust, and a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction. It is the example of other people that is our undoing; let us merely separate ourselves from the crowd, and we shall be made whole. But as it is, the populace,, defending its own iniquity, pits itself against reason. And so we see the same thing happening that happens at the elections, where, when the fickle breeze of popular favour has shifted, the very same persons who chose the praetors wonder that those praetors were chosen.”
― Seneca

“Under fire, trying to get a fugitive out of Honduras: “Their pilot hopped out of the cockpit to allow them entry room. Pack sent Keto [Belgian Malinois K-9] up first. Then he dragged Triandos up. The prisoner’s head pinged off every step on the way up. His head struck the bulkhead as Pack flung his bulk into the cabin. ‘I know there’s a protocol,’ Pack thought, ‘but whoever wrote it was never in this situation.”
― John M. Vermillion, Pack's Posse

“Sometimes abiding by the strictest rules is folly. Give me flexibility, imagination, and audacity over caution any day.”
― John M. Vermillion, Pack's Posse

“I focus on doing my duty within the bounds of the US Constitution and my conscience. As long as I’m doing my job, I don’t worry about much else.”
― John M. Vermillion, Pack's Posse

“I don’t have an impressive life master plan. I often don’t know where I’m going fifteen minutes from now. I just try to understand right from wrong, and to follow what my mother, pastors, and coaches taught me.”
― John M. Vermillion, Pack's Posse

“Pack speaking about his new love, Sky: “Well, let’s see. She has the animal husbandry skills of a vet, the organizational skills of a Six Sigma guru, and the mechanical skills of a…trained mechanic. She doesn’t require handyman help. And she’s nice to look at. Other than that, she leaves a lot to be desired. And maybe I omitted the best part, which is that she’s a fine human being with strong values.”
― John M. Vermillion, Pack's Posse

“With the support of a flesh-and-blood weapon named Major, a wondrous Belgian Mal named Keto, and a retired Judge named Shandy, Pack ripped apart the scandalous enterprise. That episode had culminated in the modern equivalent of the Gunfight at the OK Corral.”
― John M. Vermillion, Pack's Posse

“Simple wholeness, not holiness, is my object. I live a crumb, an inch, at a time, a worm plowing his way slowly through the earth, underground, out of sight and mind, just doing the best I can based on what I’ve perceived are best practices in living. I believe in truth, tradition, God and country….Without worms and insects to nourish the soil, the earth would collapse. …I’m just an insect who doesn’t have the means to understand he’s important…but he is.”
― John M. Vermillion, Pack's Posse

“The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water—all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“Jerry Laws, former smokejumper and now high school district superintendent: “We’re making changes in this district. Teachers teaching, not proselytizing, preparing students for life. No social promotions. Good order in every classroom. They must earn what they seek.”
― John M. Vermillion, Pack's Posse

“We know people and their nature… pushed and pushed and pushed… until finally… push back… it will happen… but until then, we milk the cow as long as we can… you see we want to play both sides. Have the government develop partners in Russia, China, Africa, while entertaining the Americans before their empire crumbles and they run to the Arabs… even in the idealism of a multi-polar world, there is still plenty of money to be made along the way… is there not?”
― Rohith S. Katbamna, Gulab

“Someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus, yes and a Secretary of Jesus.… Dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—“I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

“Among the more troubling trends of twenty-first-century American politics is the normalization of every election as the existential one, the one upon whose results rests the very survival of American democracy. In one way or another, there is some truth to this claim. Almost without fail, whatever deranged position sat on the periphery of the Republican Party a decade ago now resides in the center. Does anyone truly believe the same party, in another decade's time, will be more moderate and reasonable?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Patience and follow-through aren't typical American virtues. You like to make a mess and move on to the next problem. - Gabriel Allon”
― Daniel Silva, The Messenger

“The American Left specializes in being right and losing and the American Right specializes in being wrong and winning.”
― Timothy Snyder

“There's an ugly truth buried beneath the utopian economies they've crafted: that behind the surface of every American product and every European privilege is the blood of the Global South. How else could a continent with so few natural resources become so wealthy? It wasn't the gun that brought forth the Empire, but the man who dared to wield it. The bullets fueled the bloodshed, and the bloodshed fueled the profit. Such constructs the algorithm. So goes the computation. And therein lies the legacy of the American Empire: blood, bullets, and dollar bills. These are the second millennium building blocks with which third millennium technology and artificial intelligence were made. Who could blame it for carrying that legacy into the future?”
― H.J. Barner, Neon Lullabies

“There is no longer a question of who Trump is. We're horrified not just every day, but nearly hourly. The question now is who we are as a people.”
― Bill Madden

“What the Trump presidency has exposed is — the ideological divide is not so much between conservatives and liberals, but rather those who are willing to allow America to be hijacked by authoritarianism, and those who still believe in constitutional democracy and the rule of law.”
― Bill Madden

“Ethics 101: do not take ethics lessons from America.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“A nation built on ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ cannot long survive when its people are taught that no truth is self-evident at all.”
― Brutus, An America Restored: My Reflections on the Second Founding

“A people without memory cannot resist tyranny, and a nation without heroes cannot produce them.”
― Brutus, An America Restored: My Reflections on the Second Founding

“Information without truth bred skepticism; skepticism without truth bred submission.”
― Brutus, An America Restored: My Reflections on the Second Founding

“When Democrats accuse Trump of a crime, it's because he actually did it.

When Trump falsely accuses Democrats of a crime, it's because he actually did it.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Inside The Mind of an Introvert

“Fun fact:

Kennedy was the first catholic president.

Obama was the first black president.

Trump is the first mentally ill president.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Inside The Mind of an Introvert

“Sing, o sing, not of empty glory -
write anew a human story.
No more flags soaked in denial,
no more pride that breeds exile.

Rise, o rise, from myth to task -
dare the truth now, face the facts.
Not land of the free in word alone,
make humanity our only throne.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“It would be a good idea to stop asking when it was unforgivably late, or unforgivably early, to have left the Communist Party. We should also stop asking when it was too late, or too early, to have come out against the Vietnam War. A hundred years from now, Howe and Galbraith, Harrington and Schlesinger, Wilson and Debs, Jane Addams and Angela Davis, Felix Frankfurter and John L. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois and Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Reich and Jesse Jackson, will all be remembered for having advanced the cause of social justice. They will all be seen as having been "on the Left". The difference between these people and men like Calvin Coolidge, Irving Babbitt, T. S. Eliot, Robert Taft, and William Buckley will be far clearer than any of the quarrels which once divided them among themselves. Whatever mistakes they made, these people will deserve, as Coolidge and Buckley never will, the praise with which Jonathan Swift ended his own epitaph: "Imitate him if you can; he served human liberty".”
― Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

“Democracy is only as strong as those who show up and fight for it.”
― DaShanne Stokes