I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them.

 —Adlai Stevenson

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

 —Winston Churchill

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

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.

 —Alexis de Tocqueville

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right.

—H.L. Mencken

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

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.

—Oscar Ameringer

It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.

 —Tom Stoppard

People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote —a very different thing.

 —Walter H. Judd

If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.

 —Jay Leno