Friends

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Tomlin:
Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

 

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The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the party that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

 

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We preach the virtues of democracy abroad. We must practice its duties here at home. Voting is the first duty of democracy.

 

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I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there.

 

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Each candidate behaved well in the hope of being judged worthy of election. However, this system was disastrous when the city had become corrupt. For then it was not the most virtuous but the most powerful who stood for election, and the weak, even if virtuous, were too frightened to run for office.

 

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People never lie so much as after a hunt

 

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Then there's politics. Just imagine politics with its dumbbell element subtracted. There would be no Republican candidates. There would be no Democratic voters. The whole system would collapse.

 

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In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.

 

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Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.

 

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An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

 

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A politician looks forward only to the next election. A statesman looks forward to the next generation.

 

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I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.

 

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Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between [people], and their beliefs -- in religion, literature, colleges and schools -- democracy in all public and private life....

 

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We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.

 

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Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials.

 

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I guess truth can hurt you worse in an election than about anything that can happen to you.

 

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No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.

 

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You know, there's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit -- the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us -- the child who's hungry, the steelworker who's been laid-off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this -- when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers -- it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help

 

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Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. ln those transparent moments we know other people's joys and sorrows, and we care about their concerns as if they were our own

 

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Empathy is full presence to what's alive in the other person at this moment