Constituency Quotes
When Disraeli first entered politics and tried to run for Parliament the notion that he would ever become Prime Minister was very unrealistic to everyone except Disraeli. In addition to no political experience at the time, he came from a Jewish background at a time when anti-Semitism was very common and acceptable to England. Even if he were not inexperienced and Jewish, he was not part of the British aristocracy and was not socially connected. He also had no large business and industrial connections and no important family connections. However, he was a marvelous writer and speaker, a very fast learner, and turned out to be a political natural. Most historians rate him as one of the two or three greatest British Prime Ministers.
Menzies’ response to a heckler who shouted out to him, “I wouldn’t vote for you if you were the Archangel Gabriel.”
This is one of the great erroneous predictions of American political history. He was not nominated on the second ballot. Nor on the third; Lincoln was
He was referring to Russian elections. The reasons that elections in Russia are not necessary for legitimizing state power to be used by the current government, is that from the early days of the Russian Czars, the tradition and culture assumed that if there is a threat to "Mother Russia", everyone and everything in the state is at the disposal of the government, no matter who is in power. It is so strongly embedded in the culture that although many Russians want fee elections and the right to choose their leaders, they have no question that the government alway has the right and duty to marshall amm the human and physical resources to protect the state, See Quotation 644072 for more on this imporatnt concept in Russia.
