#politicians

As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live, including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are. Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#government #institutions #laws #politicians #society

I think politicians do great things in the world, but I don't think they're the only ones who can. I don't like all the rhetoric and the finger pointing. ↗

— Lauren Bush

#great #great things #i #i think #like

NASA is an engine of innovation and inspiration as well as the world's premier space exploration agency, and we are well served by politicians working to keep it that way, instead of turning it into a mere jobs program, or worse, cutting its budget. ↗

— Bill Nye

#budget #cutting #engine #exploration #innovation

The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at crossroads. ↗

— Flann O'Brien

#given #irish #jobs #majority #members

The church's teaching on marriage is unequivocal, it is uniquely, the union of a man and a woman and it is wrong that governments, politicians or parliaments should seek to alter or destroy that reality. ↗

— Keith O'Brien

#church #destroy #governments #man #marriage

Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves. ↗

— Joseph Priestley

#like #politicians #society #teenagers #war

The politicians in this world... have at their command weapons of mass destruction far more complex than their own thinking processes. ↗

— Charley Reese

#complex #destruction #far #mass #more

The War on Drugs employs millions - politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and now the military - that probably couldn't find a place for their dubious talents in a free market, unless they were to sell pencils from a tin cup on street corners. ↗

— L. Neil Smith

#corners #cup #dubious #employs #find

It seems to me that politicians ought to use the same words as other people. ↗

— Barney Frank

#other #ought #people #politicians #same

Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders. ↗

— Thomas Sowell

#april #being #big #day #discourage