Before the 2012 U.S. Vice-President Debate

Good government is good politics. - Richard J. Daley

Man is by nature a political animal. - Aristotle

In politics nothing is contemptible. - Benjamin Disraeli

All government, of course, is against liberty. - H L Mencken

Politics is the art of controlling your environment. - Hunter S. Thompson

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun. - R Buckminster Fuller

In politics, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours. - Willie Brown

We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy. - Martin L. Gross

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. - H L Mencken

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. - Bertrand de Jouvenel

A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top. - James Reston

The most important political office is that of the private citizen. - Louis D. Brandeis

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. - Will Rogers

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop. - P.J. O'Rourke

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power. - Jacob Bronowski

My sheer existence is like a political act to a lot of people. It's not to me. - Grimes

I love Canada. I am from Canada. I will bash the Canadian government but never Canada. - Jason Priestley

Of all the tasks of government, the most basic is to protect its citizens from violence. - John Foster Dulles

I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government. - Woody Allen

My brother Bob doesn't want to be in government - he promised Dad he'd go straight. - John F Kennedy

Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it. - Tom Robbins

Ronald Reagan knew who he was. Barack Obama is still working through that equation politically. - Joe Scarborough

Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you. - Unknown

Politics, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong. - Richard Armour

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. - Frederic Bastiat

When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves. - George Pataki

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. - John Kenneth Galbraith

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds. - John P Barlow

Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism. - Claude McKay

Harold MacMillan is a very intelligent man, who, as so often happens in politics, achieved supreme power too late. - Malcolm Muggeridge

Very few of these panic-mongers have any personal knowledge of the countries that are already under blackshirt government. - Lord Rothermere

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view. - Margaret Atwood

Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. - Ambrose Bierce

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. - Voltaire

I am quite sure now that often in matters concerning religion and politics, a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkeys. - Mark Twain

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. - Ronald Reagan

The Obama representatives like Robert Gibbs attack people viciously, but people like me will not be silent and will answer them back. - Donald Trump

I have respect for Senator McCain. I used to like him a lot. I supported him. I raised a lot of money for his campaign against President Obama. - Donald Trump

Our ancestors believed in magic, prayers, trickery, browbeating and bullying. I think it would be fair to sum that up as 'Irish politics'. - Flann O'Brien

Regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind. - Mahatma Gandhi