Overflight, 70

“Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
George Orwell

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
John Dalberg−Acton, 1st Baron Acton, from en.wikipedia.org

“The aim and function of political movements is capitalising the good faith of the base to the advantage of the bad faith of the top. A person is innocent until proven guilty; a politician is as guilty until proven innocent as much as he or she is powerful.”
Author’s note

“Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.”
Noam Chomsky, paraphrasing John Dewey, How The World Works

“When the total nation hasn't or cannot obtain enough food for its people, that nation is poor. When enough food exists and people cannot get it by honest labour, the state is rotten, and no effort of language will say how rotten it is. But for a banker or professor to tell you that the country cannot do this, that or the other because it lacks money is as black and foetid a lie, as grovelling and imbecile, as it would be to say it cannot build roads because it has no kilometres. (I didn't invent that phrase, but it is too good to leave idle.) …