“Most politicians lie for the same reason a monkey swings by his tail, which is to say because he can.”
“Is human dignity and human life so cheap that the rights protecting it can be traded away to appease the appetite for intimidation and prejudice of a vicious and self-centered group - for whatever reason, power, politics, nationalism, or unity?”
“I think this business of good vs. evil is of no interest to the power hungry”
“Once you are in power, never forget those who put you there. Deal with those who think they can do better than you and those who think you are god s representative on earth. Deal with each other according to his actions”
“Public men in America are too public. Too accessible. This sitting on the stoop and being just folk was all very well for local politics and the simple farmer days of a hundred years ago, but it s no good for world affairs. Opening flower-shows and being genial to babies and all that is out of date. These parish politics methods have to go. The ultimate leader ought to be distant, audible but far off. Show yourself and then vanish into a cloud. Marx would never have counted for one tenth of his weight as Charlie Marx playing chess with the boys, and Woodrow Wilson threw away all his magic as far as Europe was concerned when he crossed the Atlantic. Before he crossed he was a god -- what a god he was! After he arrived he was just a grinning guest. I ve got to be the Common Man, yes, but not common like that.”
“You English, said Steenhold. You Americans, said Rud. When you aren t as fresh as paint, he said, you Americans are as stale as old cabbage leaves. I m amazed at your Labour leaders, at the sort of things you can still take seriously as Presidential Candidates. These leonine reverberators tossing their manes back in order to keep their eyes on the White House -- they belong to the Pleistocene. We dropped that sort of head in England after John Bright. When the Revolution is over and I retire, I shall retire as Hitler did, to some remote hunting-lodge, and we ll have the heads of Great Labour Leaders and Presidential Hopes stuck all round the Hall. Hippopotami won t be in it.”
“Can anyone maintain power without lying? It looks to me like living without breathing. Morality apart, I think some evils are part and parcel of nature and we cannot do without them. Sometimes evil is even necessary to run this evil nature.”
“We have nothing to destroy, said Rud. All these things are done for already. They are falling in all over the world. They are dead. No need for destructive activities. But if we have nothing to destroy we have much to clear away. That s different. What is needed is a brand-new common-sense reorganisation of the world s affairs, and that s what we have to give them. I can t imagine how the government sleeps of nights. I should lie awake at night listening all the time for the trickle of plaster that comes before a smash. Ever since they began blundering in the Near East and Spain, they ve never done a single wise thing. This American adventure spells disaster. Plainly. Australia has protested already. India now is plainly in collapse. Everyone who has been there lately with open eyes speaks of the vague miasma of hatred in the streets. We don t get half the news from India. Just because there exists no clear idea whatever of a new India, it doesn t mean that the old isn t disintegrating. Things that are tumbling down, tumble down. They don t wait to be shown the plans of the new building. The East crumbles. All over the world it becomes unpleasant to be a foreigner, but an Englishman now can t walk in a bazaar without a policeman behind him...”
“The Golden Mean is for the weakling, it was not meant for the likes of Alexander the Great, Cyrus, Pharaohs, or Hitlers of the world”
“He came away with an exasperated sense of failure. He denounced parliamentary government root and branch that night. Parliament was doomed. The fact that it had not listened to Rud was only one little conclusive fact in a long indictment. It has become a series of empty forms, he said. All over the world, always, the sawdust of reality is running out of the shapes of quasi-public things. Not one British citizen in a thousand watches what is done in Parliament; not one in a thousand Americans follows the discourses of Congress. Interest has gone. Every election in the past thirty years has been fought on gross misunderstandings.”
“It was his first definite encounter with the wary-eyed, platitudinous, evasive Labour leaders, and he realised at once the formidable barrier of inert leadership they constituted, between the discontented masses and constructive change. They seemed to be almost entirely preoccupied by internecine intrigues and the discipline of the Party . They were steeped in Party professionalism. They were not in any way traitors to their cause, or wilfully reactionary, but they had no minds for a renascent world. They meant nothing, but they did not know they meant nothing. They regarded Rud just as in their time they had regarded Liberalism, Fabianism, Communism, Science, suspecting them all, learning nothing from them, blankly resistant. They did not want ideas in politics. They just wanted to be the official representatives of organised labour and make what they could by it. Their manner betrayed their invincible resolution, as strong as an animal instinct, to play politics according to the rules, to manoeuvre for positions, to dig themselves into positions -- and squat...”
“In politics what you see is not what you get”
“A peace that blacked yer eye, I say. A peace that split yer lip. He looks at me for another second and then gives a sad snort. “The words of a sage,” he says, “in the voice of a hick.”
“Powerless=lifeless.”
“If anyone rises to power, it s not only because he could, but also because the stars were aligned in his favor. Many with apparent means to take it failed simply because they weren t destined for the honor”
“These politicians impressed him as being the most shortsighted and sceptical men he had ever met. They lived in a little world that was bounded on the one side by office and on the other by the constituencies, and they seemed unable to imagine that it was not an eternal world. One tall man, he observed, in the year of grace 1941 was wearing a long frock-coat and a peculiar half-stiff collar reminiscent of that great parliamentary hand, Mr. Gladstone. They talked with one another about divisions; the government majority had dropped to twenty; and they talked about a scene in the House. The P.M. s manners were becoming intolerable. Then with an air of relaxation they turned to Rud. The possibility of altering opinions in the constituencies seemed a very theoretical one to them. No doubt there were these waves of opinion in the country, and an intelligent parliamentary politician observed them and dodged about among them, but it was quite outside their technique to consider how the pressures of opinion could accumulate and be directed.”
“My wife does not need the whole country to play politics with. We are only the two of us at home but she plays the highest form of politics with me. That’s why I don t understand her ways. I think I need to do a bit of political science to understand her”