Pearl S. Buck Quotes

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.

Real political issues cannot be manufactured by the leaders of political parties. The real political issues of the day declare themselves, and come out of the depths of that deep which we call public opinion.

Men and not measures are, no doubt, the very life of politics. But then it is not the fashion to say so in public places.

I did not love politics. As a matter of fact, I hated politics. I loved governing which is … a different thing.

Politicians are not the most reflective people in the world.

I think all our leaders are utterly beneath us. You just watch 'Prime Minister's Questions' and go: 'How is this the best that we've got?'

In a certain sense, and to a certain extent, he [the president] is the representative of the people. He is elected by them, as well as congress is. But can he, in the nature [of] things, know the wants of the people, as well as three hundred other men, coming from all the various localities of the nation? If so, where is the propriety of having a congress?

We do not run government on whims of an individual, our progress is reforms driven, our reforms are policy driven and our policies are people driven.

Politics is about listening and it's about leading.

Democracy virtually assures that only bad and dangerous men will ever rise to the top of government.

One of the notable aspects of the democratic process is that one need not know anything about a subject in order to pass laws about it.

It may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more constant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves.

I'm all for experimenting with sortition - randomly selected representative bodies of citizens. But I don't favor direct democracy. We're busy. We have lives. There is reddit. Who has time to work out the right answer to the thousand policy choices a gov't must make all the time?

India has been at the greatest loss because governments were run only for elections.

Politicians are simply reflections of the public.

We have moved from an age in which government leaders sought to do what was best for the people to one in which the political leadership is convinced it knows what is best for the people, whether they like it or not.

In the world at large we seldom vote for a principle or a given state of affairs. We vote for a man who pretends to believe in that principle or promises to achieve that state. We don't want a man, we want a condition of peace and plenty-- or, it may be, war and want-- but we must vote for a man.

Most of us think of government as them. Yet government isn't Them: It's us.

Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.

If we look at governments around the world, we see that the higher the women's percentage is in parliament, the more funding there is for education and for health care as compared to buying arms, for example.

I am always suspicious of the formulation that "politics" has prevented a great idea from being enacted by government. Politics IS government, in a democratic society. It's a challenge for school reformers, like reformers in any realm, to build a popular constituency for their work. If the people it's supposed to benefit vote against it, that tells me that the person pushing reform lacks political skill. And political skill is a good thing.

A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.

Congress is best viewed from a distance - the farther the better - because up close, it is truly ugly.

I hope - I'm a democrat. I'm a democratically elected politician from the Netherlands representing one of the major parties in Holland - I hope that I will be able to talk and to discuss with people.

If you want a government that's going to do the things we ask our government to do, you've got to get it from somebody.