Margaret Thatcher Quotes

In politics there are very few self-made men—most are machine-made.

The success of any executive measure must now be bought by the use of political patronage in influencing the action of legislators.

For the sake of advantage which is to be gained from the public revenues and from office, men want to be always in office.

I am not in Washington as a statesman. I am there as a very well paid messenger boy doing your errands. My chief occupation is going around with a forked stick picking up little fragments of patronage for my constituents.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Every President does it. It goes back to George Washington. I can’t say that past Administrations have asked the same questions, but the end result is the same—you put people on boards that you want.

Lincoln left the bulk of the nominations for presidential as well as for subordinate offices to his political friends and advisors. The military forces as well as the civilian establishment were exploited freely, and political generals were notoriously numerous. With more offices at his disposal than any president up to that time, … Lincoln appears to have used — or permitted the use of — the appointing power at his command as deliberately as they could have been used for practical, and usually partisan, political purposes.

In the end, the claim of a single Senator to control all nominations in his State will be found so preposterous that it will fall of its own weight.

a political machine of the greatest importance of the state.

I am not tied to the broken political machine, and I did not aspire to climb the ranks of the Cook County Democratic Party to be the party boss.

Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.

A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.

It should scare every voter in the 5th District that a powerful D.C. lobbyist is trying to install a personal congressman in our part of Connecticut.

The bureaucracy always goes with the way politicians go.

If your selling access to somebody who is a future president or current secretary of state, or if there's an implication that you are, that matters.

Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires

Because the rich are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the government. Hence arises the common opinion that there are two kinds of government - democracy and oligarchy.

The smaller the number and the more permanent and conspicuous the station of men in power, the stronger must be the interest which they will individually feel in whatever concerns the government.

The form of government is a democracy when the free, who are also poor and the majority, govern, and an oligarchy when the rich and the noble govern, they being at the same time few in number.

Not only has the number of government employees multiplied in recent decades, but the rise of government unions further stacks the political odds against private citizens.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

I see a government completely out of control, and money is number one. Integrity isn't even on the map.

Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him, known as the Lateran Pact of 1929. Under the terms of this deal, Catholicism became the only recognized religion in Italy, with monopoly powers over matters such as birth, marriage, death, and education, and in return urged its followers to vote for Mussolini's party. Pope Pius XI described II Duce (“the leader”) as “a man sent by providence.”

It may be useful to remember that a peacetime political machine is built essentially on patronage.

It is the rare - maybe even nonexistent - politician who will admit this, but number one on the politicians to-do list is always to get reelected. Nothing else comes close. The economy, the stock market, the war on terrorism ... NOTHING comes ahead of getting reelected. Staying in power is job number one.