Quotes & Sayings About Hypocrisy In Politics

He thinks for a long time, about injustice, cruelty and the almighty dollar. About hypocrisy and power ballads. About ego, ambition and politics. The usual reasons stuff got done down here. Jesus looks at the glass, at the hateful, grieving faces, and speaks softly towards the microphone. 'When the truth of all this comes out none of you should be too hard on yourselves. You ... I mean, the Bible's mostly a crock, but there's no other way to say this, folks ... you know not what you did. Just try and remember,' he smiles, 'be nice. — John Niven

As children we are taught, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me!" As adults we teach those same words to our own children while simultaneously we sue one another for defamation or verbal assault. Ah, the naked leading the blind. — Bryan Oftedahl

Honesty in politics is the result of strength; hypocrisy is the result of weakness. — Vladimir Lenin

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit. — Noam Chomsky

Hypocrisy is the scarlet letter in politics. — Mark McKinnon

The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kind of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind. — Mark Haskell Smith

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who today is mad enough to challenge the virtues of eliminating hypocrisy from politics? Or of providing more information - the direct result of self-tracking - to facilitate decision making? Or of finding new incentives to get people interested in saving humanity, fighting climate change, or participating in politics? Or of decreasing crime? To question the appropriateness of such interventions, it seems, is to question the Enlightenment itself.

And yet I feel that such questioning is necessary. — Evgeny Morozov

It is the philosophers, theologians, and evangelists who are said to be filled with pride and bigotry due to the strong convictions that they represent. On the contrary, teachings can be either taken or dismissed; whereas voting is the only thing the average person can do to force everyone to live how they would prefer. A simple vote is among the largest yet most acceptable forms of bigotry, and that is because people play the card only when they feel that in doing so it conveniences themselves. — Criss Jami

In all, the future secretary of defense and wartime vice president[, Dick Cheney,] would receive five deferments during the Vietnam War, protecting him from service during his draft-eligible years. — Charlie Savage

We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches
the cross was well-designed! a land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small
the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia
life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam. — Norman Mailer

To win the people, always cook them some savoury that pleases them. — Aristophanes

Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlour game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter. — Catherynne M Valente

Hypocrisy is our friend. Power structures have to pretend to hold values in order to win the loyalty of at least some of society. We can use the gap between those professed values and reality to move people to try to change the reality towards the values. — Justin Podur

Princes give rewards with their own hands,
But death or punishment by the hands of other. — John Webster

You sanctimonious philistines, who scoff at me!
What has your politics fed on
since you've been ruling the world?
On butchery and murder! — Charles De Coster

Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy. — Reinhold Niebuhr

I made up three lists: Candidate's Accomplishments (real and imaginary), Accusations Against Opponent (including rumours, allegations, innuendos, and lies), and Empty Promises (the more improbable, the better). Then it was merely a matter of taking various combinations of items from the three lists, throwing in some bombast, tossing in a few local references, and, there it was - a brand new speech. — Rohinton Mistry

What has to do with your ability to fall asleep is not caffeine. It's having a clean conscience. I have a clean conscience so I can drink all the caffeine I want. — Bob Barr

Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy.. a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose. — H.L. Mencken

The United States is now harbouring Luis Posada Carriles. His continued freedom mocks victims of terrorism everywhere. It also shows how heavily the 'war on terror' is overlaid with politics and hypocrisy. — Stephen Kinzer

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. — Frederick Douglass

A lot of lip service gets paid to being honest, but no one really wants to hear it unless what's being said is the party line. — Colin Quinn

Historical tempers have cooled only slightly after the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying under oath about a sexual relationship. Many Americans still believe his actions were a threat to the very rule of law; others insist that the "offense" was more low farce than high crime, and that the zeal of Clinton's foes was partisan hypocrisy rather than constitutional passion. — Garrett Epps

A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday. — Russell Baker

The American people are fed up ... with political posturing.' True, but also an example of political posturing. — James Taranto

You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in. — Arundhati Roy

A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation. — Adlai E. Stevenson II

The result always mattered more than the rhetoric. — Jeffrey Toobin

Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like 'a plantation,' adding in a significant tone of voice that 'you know what I mean ... '
She did not repeat this trope, for some reason, when addressing the electors of Iowa or New Hampshire. She's willing to ring the other bell, though, if it suits her. But when an actual African-American challenger comes along, she rather tends to pout and wince at his presumption (or did until recently). — Christopher Hitchens

No president likes leaks, but it's worth noting candidate Trump's path to power was tread on a road of leaks. He didn't have a problem with leaks then. It's not a moral position if you only hold it when it applies to you. — Jake Tapper

In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. — Hannah Arendt

I have noticed more than once in life that a taste for the ineffably twee can go hand-in-hand with a distinctly uncharitable outlook on the world, I once shared an office with a woman who had covered the wall space behind her desk with pictures of fluffy kitties; she was the most bigoted, spiteful champion of the death penalty with whom it has ever been my misfortune to share a kettle.
A love of all things saccharine often seems present where there is a lack of real warmth or charity. — J.K. Rowling

Americans, though apparently impressed by ghastly sentimentality and outrageous hypocrisy, are by nature much more politically cynical than Canadians. In their longer history they have had much more to be cynical about. They demand a vulgar show, enjoy it, guffaw, and forget it the next morning. When a new U.S. President takes office all bets are off and his campaign platform is dismantled and stored away. — Gordon Donaldson

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime. — Max Stirner

Politics is the only art whose artists regularly disown their masterpieces. — Raheel Farooq

We need democracy and meritocracy, not mockracy and hypocrisy. — TheKeyAuthor

Look at the tyranny of party
at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty
a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes
and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits; and all the while, their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing thier doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible-texts and billies, and pocketing the insults nad licking the shoes of his Southern master. — Mark Twain