Paul Craig Roberts Quotes

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

All governments lie, including our own—under Democrats and Republicans.

I hate politics. What they say and what they do is completely different.

I think Ralph Nader is the biggest liar in American politics when he said it didn't matter who was president.

Most governments do have inbuilt biases in favour of the rich and powerful, and most do contain plenty of manipulators who love intrigue, who have lost whatever moral compass they may once have had and who protect themselves with steely cynicism.

Bull permeates everything.... American people think politics and politicians are full of baloney.

The political elite has never told the truth.

In friendships, you expect total trust; in business you expect some dishonesty. But in politics, you not only expect distortion as a way of life but accept it with pleasure.

What havoc, said I to myself, would these manners make in America! Our governors, our judges, our senators or representatives, and even our ministers, would be appointed by harlots, for money; and their judgments, decrees, and decisions, be sold to repay themselves, or, perhaps, to procure the smiles of profligate females.

At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of the day - indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue - the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours.

Tom DeLay himself has never been the issue. DeLay is a symptom of a larger disease?a sick Republican culture of corruption that touches everyone who took his dirty money, voted for his corrupt leadership, or sat silently while their party has sold our government to the highest bidder.

The politicians in America are all taken over by the lobbyists. I really believe the lobbyists keep them shut up because China and Chinese companies have all got tremendous lobbyists.

I think politicians in America don't speak up because their local lobbyist has them shut up.

Blight has descended on our regulatory agencies - and a dry rot, beginning in Washington, is seeping into every corner of America - in the payola mentality, the expense account way of life, the confusion between what is legal and what is right.

Unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.

I think the big problem is you have a vicious cycle of wealth and power in America that's just gotten completely out of control and you've seen it in politics.

There is no way to avoid the reality that the American government in the past years has been the most spectacularly hypocrisy-driven government in the world. We rival the Soviet Union in some stages, in some ways, in hypocrisy.

How wonderful to know someone who was bad and dishonorable and a cheat and a liar, when all the world was filled with people who would not lie to save their souls and who would rather starve than do a dishonorable deed!

The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.

As long as we continue to fight in between the jamming with all we have to save America from the current suicidal deathwish of the corrupt, criminal punks intentionally destroying the last best place.

In America, we do cheat. We have people who cheat in elections.

The Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver. . . . Was there ever witnessed such a bare faced corruption in any country before?

All governments are lying cocksuckers.

One or two of these scoundrel statesmen should be shot once a-year, just to keep the others on their good behavior.

Symptoms of ethical, political and economic impoverishment are all around us.