Harry S. Truman Quotes

Lincoln was right about not fooling all the people all of the time. But the Republicans haven't given up trying.

It's the oldest trick in Washington - when presented with a policy solution you don't like, characterize it as the bogeyman.

It takes quite a bit of nerve for Democrats to complain about inflation. This reminds me of germs complaining about the disease.

Our two-party system is a fraud, a sham, a delusion. On foreign policy, trade, immigration, Big Government, we have one-party government, one party press; and conservatives are being played for suckers.

However little president Obama knows or cares about economics, he knows a lot about politics - and especially political rhetoric. 'High-speed rail' is simply another set of loft words to justify continued expansion of government spending. So are words like 'investment in education' or 'investment' in any number of other things, which serves the same political purpose.

But politicians who talk about failed policies are just blowing smoke. Government policies succeed in doing exactly what they are supposed to do: channeling resources bilked from the general public to politically organized and influential interests groups.

To the extent that our political dialogue is such where everything is under suspicion, everybody is corrupt and everybody is doing things for partisan reasons, and all of our institutions are full of malevolent actors - if that's the storyline that's being put out there by whatever party is out of power, then when a foreign government introduces that same argument with facts that are made up, voters who have been listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff every day from talk radio or other venues, they're going to believe it.

Your money has never been safe in the government's hands, and it never will be. Governments spend money; it's just their nature.

What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the state powers into the hands of the general government.

The degree to which the people of America are being dumbed down on purpose every day is striking. And all for the express purpose of maintaining in power a political party [the Democrats] which seeks a permanent underclass and as many dependent people on government as possible. As many uninformed, misinformed, know-nothings as they can get.

It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.

If we're not there making the argument then the cultural gulf that Republicans try to exploit saying, "Ah, these city slickers: they're all looking down on you, they don't care about you. They're just trying to help out their various special interest constituencies," that argument ends up being successful.

There are lots of other things that affect state growth besides state taxes. However, the reason I look at taxes is because these are policy variables that can be changed by state governments in order to get better results than they otherwise had.

People in the political world have every incentive to say things that lead voters away from a clear economic understanding of issues. What has happened more and more is that organized groups have more and more reasons to say things that don't make any economic sense.

Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.

People have put a lot of faith in the government's ability to get growth going in China. People have this, what I think, illusion that there are six people in China who really have their hand on every button. And what we're learning is, it's a very big economy and they're not that good at it.

[E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics

The only difference I ever found between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership is that one of them is skinning you from the ankle up and the other, from the ear down.

A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.

As a lobbyist he had long ago concluded there was no difference in how Democrats and Republicans conducted the business of government. The game stayed the same: It was always about favors and friends, and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging on to power, whatever it took.

Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.

What a benefit would the American government, not yet relieved of its extreme need, render to itself, and to every city, village and hamlet in the States, if it would tax whiskey and rum almost to the point of prohibition! Was it Bonaparte who said that he found vices very good patriots? "He got five millions from the love of brandy, and he should be glad to know which of the virtues would pay him as much." Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

A lot of the Republican rhetoric better than the Democrats'. But when they're in office, it's pretty much the same thing. It's serving their supporters, it's corporate welfare, it's cronyism which is so destructive, particularly to the disadvantaged.

See, when the government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs.