To my mind, if we do not get a handle on money in politics and the degree to which big money controls the political process in this country, nobody is going to bring about the changes that is needed in this country for the middle class and working families.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.

In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem.

There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.

Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism. Politicians challenge it at their peril because of the lobby’s ability to influence political contributions.

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

Never complain and never explain.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

That government is best which governs least.

The definition of terrorism is killing civilians with the intent of changing their political affiliation.

You have to look also to the media, where you have a vast majority of the loudest and most influential political voices in America media from people who came from the entertainment world.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along.

You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.

Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

The American political system is not good at trading sacrifice now to prevent crises later.