Politics × Virtue

Politics and Virtue

Browse 30 quotations catalogued under Politics with "virtue" in the text or topic label.

30 quotes

This collection contains 30 quotations filed under Politics with "virtue" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Politics and Virtue; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, Thomas Mann, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the s…" The full quotation appears below.

Another matching quotation reads: "I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feare…" Compare the wording and surrounding context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

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30 Quotes on Politics and Virtue

"While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years."

— Abraham Lincoln

"I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared."

— Thomas Jefferson

"I have in general no very exalted opinion of the virtue of paper government."

— Edmund Burke

"I met the New Passion, then, as democracy, as political enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness. I understood its efforts to be toward the politicization of everything ethos; its aggressiveness and doctrinary intolerance consisted – I experienced them personally – in its denial and slander of every nonpolitical ethos. “Mankind” as humanitarian internationalism; “reason” and “virtue” as the radical republic; intellect as a thing between a Jacobin club and Freemasonry; art as social literature and maliciously seductive rhetoric in the service of social “desirability”; here we have the New Passion in its purest political form as I saw it close up. I admit that this is a special, extremely romanticized form of it."

— Thomas Mann

"No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue."

— John F. Kennedy

"Public services, in other words, are owed by the state — and its governors — to the governed. They are nothing like a favor that the state generously extends toward the governed, despite the negative connotations years of liberal polemics have imposed upon the phrase "the welfare state.", one of the most important theorists of the public service, made this fundamental point at the beginning of the twentieth century: it is the primacy of the duties of those in power in relation to the governed that forms the basis of what we call the "public service." For Duguit, public services are not a manifestation of state power, but a limitation of governmental power. The public service is a mechanism by which the governors become the servants of the governed. These obligations, which are imposed on those who govern as well as the agents of government, form the basis of what Duguit calls "public responsibility." This is why the public service is a principle of social solidarity, one which is imposed on all, and not a principle of sovereignty, inasmuch as the latter is incompatible with the very idea of public responsibility. This conception of the public service has largely been suppressed by the fiction of state sovereignty. But the public service nonetheless continues to make itself felt by virtue of the strong connection citizens feel toward what they still consider to be a. For the citizen's right to public services is the strict corollary of the duty or obligation of state representatives to provide public services. This why the citizens of various European countries affected by the current crisis have demonstrated, in diverse ways, their attachment to public services in their daily fight against the coronavirus: for instance, the citizens of numerous Spanish cities have applauded their healthcare workers from their balconies, regardless of their political attitude toward the centralized."

— Christian Laval

"All political progress has been the removal of forced and artificial relations among men, and the establishment of natural relations. Democracy is a search for natural leaders and the rights and privileges that belong to man by virtue of his manhood."

— John Burroughs

"The origin of corruption in politics is surely in the thought that you are the bearer of ultimate virtue."

"Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs."

— Aldo Leopold

"Happily virtue is natural in the people, aristocratical prejudices. A nation is truly corrupt, when, after having, by degrees lost its character and liberty, it slides from democracy into aristocracy or monarchy; this is the death of the political body by decrepitude...."

— Maximilien Robespierre

"No government is perfect. One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected."

— Harry S. Truman

"The warmth of zeal is not perhaps the most dangerous rock that we have to avoid; but rather that languour which ease produces and a distrust of our own courage. Therefore continually wind up the sacred spring of republican government, instead of letting it run down. I need not say that I am not here justifying any excess. Principles the most sacred may be abused: the wisdom of government should guide its operations according to circumstances, it should time its measures, choose its means; for the manner of bringing about great things is an essential part of the talent of producing them, just as wisdom is an essential attribute of virtue...."

— Maximilien Robespierre

"The weapon of the Republic is terror, and virtue is its strength."

— Georg Büchner

"The nation and the government in Germany are one thing. The will of the people is the will of the government and vice versa. The modern structure of the German State is a higher form of democracy in which, by virtue of the people’s mandate, the government is exercised authoritatively while there is no possibility for parliamentary interference to obliterate and render ineffective the execution of the nation’s will."

— Joseph Goebbels

"His tenure as President was a period of unparelled political turmoil and saw him swear in three governments led by Morarji Desai, Charan Singh and Indira Gandhi. He took historic decisions on a number of important issues. By virtue of his long years in public life and close association with leaders from all sections of opinion, he was able to be a steady hand at the wheel of state. His wisdom, friendliness and accessibility endeared him to people belonging to all walks of life. He lent distinction to the highest office of the land by his idealism and patriotism."

— Neelam Sanjiva Reddy

"It is not, perhaps, unreasonable to conclude, that a pure and perfect democracy is a thing not attainable by man, constituted as he is of contending elements of vice and virtue, and ever mainly influenced by the predominant principle of self-interest. It may, indeed, be confidently asserted, that there never was that government called a republic, which was not ultimately ruled by a single will, and, therefore, virtually and substantially a monarchy."

— Alexander Fraser Tytler

"Surely we have had enough of confusing maleness with "usefulness" and other human virtues. If men had a more modest view of what their masculinity ought to entail, perhaps they could move on from debilitating feelings of loss to tackling their real economic and political problems."

— Ellen Willis

"Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not Governments. When governments are generous it is with other people's money, other people's safety, other people's future."

— P. D. James

"And thus we see the government is at once both protector and predator. It is not that governments begin in virtue only to end in sin. Government begins by protecting some against others and ends up protecting itself against everyone. This is the course of history."

— Robert LeFevre

"The relation of politics to personality in this deepening of democracy has a scope broader than the need to economize on political virtue. One way to explore this relation is to consider the bearing of a program like the one outlined here upon two great sources of human sadnessː the loss of vitality and the disproportion between such vitality as we keep and the activities normally available for its expression."

— Roberto Mangabeira Unger

"We may appeal to every page of history we have hitherto turned over, for proofs irrefragable, that the people, when they have been unchecked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous and cruel as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power … All projects of government, formed upon a supposition of continual vigilance, sagacity, and virtue, firmness of the people, when possessed of the exercise of supreme power, are cheats and delusions … The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor. Equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical."

"The publishers profess to be the agents of heaven in establishing virtue and therefore that they ought to receive some subsidy from the government. I can ask no stronger refutation to this claim … than the utterly unscrupulous methods pursued by them in seeking to influence Congress on this subject."

— William Howard Taft

"Andrew Jackson neatly resolved the issue by walking into congress and placing his hand on the Bible they kept there as a reminder of all the virtues they worked so hard to get the voters to believe they possessed."

— Orson Scott Card

"The Soviet Union, as might be expected, conducted a ceaseless campaign to persuade the less-developed countries to nationalize their petroleum industries, by deprecating the record of private oil enterprises and extolling the virtues of governmental petroleum monopolies."

— Neil H. Jacoby

"Keynes's politics of the Middle Way in the 1920s can be interpreted in two senses. It can be seen as an expression of an Aristotelian sense of balance, with both nineteenth-century individualism and twentieth-century communism being viewed as excesses of their virtues. Or Keynes can be seen as a prophet of individualism on the defensive. The institutions of society had become like rocks which required the most skillful circumnavigation if the ship of state were not to be smashed up. There was no margin left for stupidity, silliness or obsolete ideas in government. Only the most generous and disinterested spirit, equipped with high intelligence and scientific policies, could save the social order from shipwreck."

— Robert Skidelsky

"The life of a republic lies certainly in the energy, virtue, and intelligence of its citizens; but it is equally true that a good revenue system is the life of an organized government. I meet you at a time when the nation has voluntarily burdened itself with a debt unprecedented in our annals. Vast as is its amount, it fades away into nothing when compared with the countless blessings that will be conferred upon our country and upon man by the preservation of the nation's life. Now, on the first occasion of the meeting of Congress since the return of peace, it is of the utmost importance to inaugurate a just policy, which shall at once be put in motion, and which shall commend itself to those who come after us for its continuance. We must aim at nothing less than the complete effacement of the financial evils that necessarily followed a state of civil war."

— Andrew Johnson

"There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as caring and sensitive because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he is willing to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he will do good with his own money — if a gun is held to his head."

— P. J. O'Rourke

"Good government is the outcome of private virtue."

— John Jay Chapman

"Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice — a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing."

— Wendy Kaminer

"I am delighted to be named the first UKIP spokesman for Women and Equalities These important issues need to be promoted without patronising tokenism, virtue-signalling and political correctness."

— Margot Parker

Key thinkers on this theme

Abraham Lincoln· Politics Thomas Jefferson· Politics Edmund Burke· Philosophy Thomas Mann· Literature John F. Kennedy· Politics

Related ideas in Politics

All Politics quotes Explore the idea of Virtue