Jonathan Swift Quotes on Politics (4 Quotes)

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.

And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue of teaching ministers to consult the public good of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.

If a man should register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.