Political Classification Quotes

They that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government.

I'm not - I'm not going to define people by labels: who's a real Republican, who's not a real Republican.

The usual terminology of political language is stupid. What is 'left' and what is 'right'? Why should Hitler be 'right' and Stalin, his temporary friend, be 'left'? Who is 'reactionary' and who is 'progressive'? Reaction against an unwise policy is not to be condemned. And progress towards chaos is not to be commended.

The appellation of Aristocrats and Democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all [political] parties.

I despise all adjectives that try to describe people as liberal or conservative, rightist or leftist, as long as they stay in the useful part of the road.

We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.

We are asking the IRS to do something impossible: conduct nonpolitical evaluations of political organizations' political activities.

Liberals are liberals, and it's not helpful to them when they are so identified. They go out of their way to avoid being called liberal. They don't like it. They talk about Republican versus Democrat, voter identification, conservative versus liberal is where you need to look.

We must get rid of the habit of classing all women together politically and thinking of the 'woman's vote' as one and indivisible.

We have two distinct types of political organization to take into account; and clearly, too, when their origins are considered, it is impossible to make out that the one is a mere perversion of the other. Therefore when we include both types under a general term like government, we get into logical difficulties; difficulties of which most writers on the subject have been more or less vaguely aware, but which, until within the last half-century, none of them has tried to resolve.

The current attitude is pretty much the attitude we had in the CIA during the 1950s. When we analysed the operational climate and all the political forces in any given country, we had our friends and we had our enemies. There was no one in between. The friends were centre and Right wing social democrats, conservatives, liberals, in some cases all the way over to neo-fascists. The enemies were Left wing social democrats, socialists, Communists, all the way to those advocating armed struggle.