Charles Bukowski Quotes

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

A political machine is a united minority working against a divided majority.

In whose delusional mind is democracy made 'better' by allowing wealthy people to control more of it?

Dependency is the highest political good - at least for politicians. Since the 1930s, politicians have striven to leave no vote unbought.

I don't know one person who has changed their vote from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump because Vladimir Putin wanted them to do that.

There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.

What in fact takes place in an election is that two hand picked candidates are propped up before the citizenry, each candidate having been selected by a very small group of politically active people. A minority of the people... then elects one of these hand picked people to rule itself and the majority.

We shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so that they will vote for you or scaring people to date so that we can create a terror-industrial complex.

To be frank, politics is about wanting power, getting it, exercising it, and keeping it.

You can't show up at a church every 4 October and say, 'Vote for me,' and call that persuasion.

The reality is, the Republicans in Massachusetts are irrelevant and they're in collusion with the Democrats.

The bureaucracy always goes with the way politicians go.

No matter who you vote for, the government stays in power

The ruling class is the rich. . . . And those people are so able to manipulate our democracy that they really control the democracy.

The smaller the government, the less the need to manipulate politicians.

Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.

Are we prepared to take on the enormous political power of the billionaire class or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy?

The oligarchs think that the people are both dangerous and stupid. Their point is moot. But we do know that the oligarchs are a good deal more dangerous to the polity than the people at large.

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.

What we're doing is saying what happens with the establishment and how are we as ordinary human beings are used as pawns. What do we really know about what goes on! We think we are a democracy.... Are we? I'm not so sure.

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.

Popularity is not the single determining factor, as we all know, in how people vote.

Putin doesn't conduct elections in the Western sense of elections. This is more accurately probably described as a plebiscite, where people are supposed to express their support for him. The Russian system is not unique in this respect, but it is rather interesting. Here, in the West, the impression that people have is that Putin runs the whole country. This is not so, at all. To a certain extent, you could say that he runs the Kremlin, and this means that it's, in some situations, hard to tell whether it's him running the Kremlin, or the people around him running him.

Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.

Politics will take whatever shape it needs for people to get elected. But at the end of the day, the population remains and that's really, as an educator, who I care about.