“All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.”
— John Arbuthnot

“The liar is eventually caught in their own sticky web of words, forgetting they are responsible for weaving it. Then their very existence is at the mercy of the weakest passing breeze. By the time they realize this, it is always too late.”
— Richard Sherricky

“Supply-side economics liberate conservatives from any need to insist on fiscal rectitude and balanced budgets [saying] that one could cut taxes and balance budgets, because incentive effects could generate new activity and so higher revenue.
“The political genius of this idea is evident…. It allowed conservatives to ignore deficits and gave an economic justification for lowering taxes on politically important supporters. In this way, the Republicans were transformed from a balanced-budget party to a tax-cutting party.”
— Martin Wolf in the Financial Times.

“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to [those] he knows to be idiots.”
— H.L. Mencken

“But when men who believe neither in my god nor in their own — men who do not know the meaning of the word religion — when these men drag me to the foot of an iron statue that has become the symbol of the terror and darkness through which they walk, of their cruelty and greed, of their hatred of God and their oppression of man — when they ask me to pledge my soul before the people that this hideous idol is God, and that all this wickedness and falsehood is divine truth, I cannot do it, not if they could put a thousand cruel deaths on me. I tell you, it is physically impossible.”
— Lavinia, from G.B. Shaw’s play “Androcles and the Lion.”

“During the Great Depression, Germans rallied to one-man-one-party rule, uniforms, flags and rifles, mass rallies, racial hatred, and appeals to national glory. What would happen in other countries if small businessmen, housewives, artisans, white-collar workers, and students felt betrayed by an alien political establishment, a fraying welfare net, and chronic economic dislocations?”
— Claudia Koonz

“The main threat to Democracy comes not from the extreme left but from the extreme right, which is able to buy huge sections of the press and radio, and wages a constant campaign to smear and discredit every progressive and humanitarian measure.”
— George Seldes, in the days before television.

“In a flip on Barry Goldwater’s ‘You know in your heart he’s right’ slogan, today’s conservative Republicans, it might be said, ‘know in their hearts they’re wrong.’ ”
— Arris Jaye

“Stop and listen to me! They’re not human! Can’t you see? Everyone! They’re here already! You’re next!”
— Kevin McCarthy, from the film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” [1956].