Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good. "

Related Quotes:

" Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses. "

" The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961. "

" The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement. "

" A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience. "

" Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it. "

" Only recently - about five minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy - have parents been driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that 'as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.' "

" Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people. "

" Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal. "

" Well, you know, the definition of second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. "

" Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration - which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better - has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated. "

" Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known. "

" Political ignorance helps explain Americans' perpetual disappointment with politicians generally, and presidents especially, to whom voters unrealistically attribute abilities to control events. "

" Modern parents want to nurture so skillfully that Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting produces from the soft clay of children. "

" The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised. "

" Barack Obama hopes his famous health care victory will mark him as a transformative president. History, however, may judge it to have been his missed opportunity to be one. "

" Corporations do not pay taxes, they collect them, passing the burden to consumers as a cost of production. And corporate taxation is a feast of rent-seeking - a cornucopia of credits, exemptions and other subsidies conferred by the political class on favored, and grateful, corporations. "

" Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout 'Bang!' "

" Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese. "

" Money is time made tangible - the time invested in the earning of it. Taxation is the confiscation of the earner's time. Although some taxation is necessary, all taxation diminishes freedom. "

" If those who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment had imagined laws restricting immigration - and had anticipated huge waves of illegal immigration - is it reasonable to presume they would have wanted to provide the reward of citizenship to the children of the violators of those laws? Surely not. "

" Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy - judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes - because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences. "

" Big government is indeed big, and like another big creature, the sauropod dinosaur, government has a primitive nervous system: The fact of an injury to the tail could take nearly a minute to be communicated to the sauropod brain. "

" Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions. "

" World War II was the last government program that really worked. "