Quotations for Election Days
Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish is to give a "fairy-tale ball" at Newport. Somebody should go as a campaign promise. ~Poems and Paragraphs by Robert Elliott Gonzales, 1918
...the politicians... talked themselves red, white, and blue in the face... ~Clare Boothe, Europe in the Spring, 1940
During a political campaign the air is full of speeches — and vice versa. ~20,000 Quips & Quotes, compiled by Evan Esar, 1968
Wise politicians don't try to fool the people all the time, but only when votes are needed. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1903, George Horace Lorimer, editor
The worst thing about politics is that when it's dressed up for election it can look so darned much like patriotism! ~J. W. Cunningham (1881–1971), Corn on the Cob, 1952 [This line may have been first published as early as the 1930s, in a Toledo, Ohio newspaper.
I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
BALLOT BOX. The altar of democracy. ~H. L. Mencken
Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time... ~Winston Churchill
There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen. ~20,000 Quips & Quotes, compiled by Evan Esar, 1968
People on whom I do not bother to dote
Are people who do not bother to vote...
And excuse themselves by saying What's the difference of one vote in fifty million?
They have such refined and delicate palates
That they can discover no one worthy of their ballots,
And then when someone terrible gets elected
They say, There, that's just what I expected!...
Oh let us cover these clever people very conspicuously with loathing,
For they are un-citizens in citizens' clothing...
~Ogden Nash (1902–1971), "Election Day Is a Holiday"
Yet every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country — and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians. ~Charles Krauthammer, "Political Suicide," in The Washington Post, 1994
Our presidential race is beginning to sound more and more like Harry Potter's duel with the Ministry of Magic. ~David J. Beard (1947–2016), @Raqhun, tweet, 2008
And that conviction will, I dare say, be backed up by the greatest torrent of money ever poured out to influence an American election — poured out by the men who fear nothing so much as change and who want everything to stay as it is — only more so. This idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal — that you can gather votes like box-tops — is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process. ~Adlai E. Stevenson, 1956
Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster. ~James Harvey Robinson, c.1930
Why pay money to have your family tree traced; just go into politics and your opponents will do it for you. ~20,000 Quips & Quotes, compiled by Evan Esar, 1968
I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them. ~Adlai E. Stevenson, 1952
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. I'm beginning to believe it. ~Clarence Darrow
That terrible earthquake at some unknown point is probably the recoil from the November landslide. ~Indianapolis Star, 1920