The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.
George Jean NathanRead
Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the responsibility of citizens to vote, hinting that their inaction leads to poor leadership.
This quote by George Jean Nathan underscores the critical role that voter participation plays in the democratic process. It suggests that when good citizens fail to engage in elections, they inadvertently allow unfit leaders to be chosen, thus highlighting a direct connection between civic duty and the quality of governance.
In practice
During a political debate, one might say this quote to encourage audience members to participate in upcoming elections.
The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.
Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.
It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.
It is the mark of a superior person that, left to themselves they are able endlessly to amuse, interest and entertain themselves out of their personal stock of meditations, ideas, criticisms, memories, philosophy, humor and what not.
Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform.
With his mendacity and increasingly virulent attacks on immigrants, Muslims, women, the press, the judiciary, the intelligence services, the F.B.I. - any group or institution that he finds threatening or useful as a scapegoat - Mr. Trump is attempting the Orwellian trick of redefining American reality on his own terms.
Wherever the Government does not emanate...from the people, the principle of the Government, the esprit de corps, the point of honour, in all those connected with it, and raised by it to privileges above the law and above humanity, will be hatred to the people.
The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. ...when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress.
The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the goverment.
Ultimately, Communism must be defeated by progressive political programs which wipe out the poverty, misery, and discontent on which it thrives.
Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
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