Politics and Power

[ Remark after vice-presidential debate with Geraldine Ferraro :] We tried to kick a little ass last night.

 

The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.

 

The big mo [momentum].

 

The liberation of Kuwait has begun. In conjunction with the forces of our coalition partners, the United States has moved under the code name Operation Desert Storm to enforce the mandates of the United Nations Security Council.

 

What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind—peace and security, freedom and the rule of law.

 

We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.

 

Time and again in this century, the political map of the world was transformed. And in each instance, a new world order came about through the advent of a new tyrant, or the outbreak of a bloody global war, or its end. Now the world has undergone another upheaval, but this time, there’s no war.

 

[ On the Iran-Contra scandal :] Clearly, mistakes were made.

 

[ Of Ronald Reagan’s proposals to increase government revenues by reducing taxes :] Voodoo economics.

 

The hungry and the homeless don’t care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.

Judges commonly are elderly men, and are more likely to hate at sight any analysis to which they are not accustomed, and which disturbs repose of mind, than to fall in love with novelties.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or, to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.

Government and co-operation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form—that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility—can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the Headless Monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no, and they'll push and I'll say no, and they'll push again.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.

The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them.

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of dist.

The only real power comes out of a long rifle.