Joe Walsh Quotes

Most Scots might be able to identify six vegetables - but only two MSPs. There are parts of Scotland where you rarely get more than 40% turnout at the polls. There's a big disconnect there, and I think comedians bridge that gap.

Hopeless people do not vote. They don’t think that they can change anything anymore.

From the standpoint of democratic legitimacy, it's a problem if half the electorate, or close to it, declines to vote, not least because they may not feel much of a stake in the whole process.

I'm baffled by the people who say, 'I'm just not going to vote.'

I was born and brought up in south east London and been very conscious for a long time that people feel politics happens to them and not with them.

As I reflect back on what's worked for me in this [presidential] office it's been that I've gotten people who maybe didn't believe in the process to get engaged. Ironically, I've even gotten the other side that maybe didn't believe in the process to get engaged.

I believe myself that there's a great deal more interest and engagement among Americans than our politicians recognize.

I've voted in every election - not always for the same political party and never with any degree of enthusiasm.

So few people vote these days, and I think it's partly because they don't feel like the institution really means anything to them. If you want them to vote, give them opportunities to do something else other than vote, to help.

Part of the problem you have is that you don't have a dialogue between elected officials and their constituents. They've built these barricades, these barriers around themselves and tried to avoid interaction with their constituents.

I don't think that people are disinterested or uninterested in politics. I think very often they are disengaged from the formal political process. To some extent they are suspicious or even despairing of formal politics as a means to give expression and effect to what they want.

Government is at its worst when you have apathy from its citizens.

I do vote but I don't think that any political party represents my point of view.

Susan B. Anthony must be turning in her grave if she knew that millions of women who have the right to vote are not exercising it. Why? Because they haven't got the interest or the time, or they have just given up hope.

What makes me worry today is the alarming decline in the trust in democratic institutions - political parties, Parliaments, political leaders. Less and less people are going to the polls in most advanced democracies.

There's a temptation not to vote at all as a protest, but it's definitely not a protest. In fact, all it does is keep the people in power in power, and I don't think they should be.

The danger of democracy has always been the danger of an electorate seized by passivity.

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference and undernourishment.

A growing number of people in this country do not believe that it makes a real difference who is elected President of the United States.

Voters who are neither bound to the great political nor to any of the little sectarian divisions have no means of making their votes available.

It's too bad that such crowds can't be turned out in the United States.

In some communities, I show up, and they say, 'Well, we haven't seen our Democrat congressman in 10 years.'

I worry that, given the way the 2016 election went, how cynical and how terrible politics seems, that young people will be less likely to get involved.

It's so deeply disturbing to me that half of the eligible voters don't vote in this country. We talk about how divided the country is. The truth is, we don't even know. We just know what the half that voted thought.

The political graveyards are full of people who don't respond.