Looking to history for inspiration on modern politics
Today being Saturday, I reckoned that some little levity wouldn’t go amiss, and what better than a few quotes from politicians, and others, Irish and otherwise, to help lighten the gloom, for the weekend at least.
Here’s a few that particularly take my fancy:
- “The first duty of every TD, once they’re elected to this house, is to ensure their own re-election at the next election.” — Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Dáil Éireann, circa 2003. Now you know what they’re all at.
- “Politicians campaign in poetry, but they must govern in prose.” — Mario Cuomo, Governor of New York 1983-1995. Unfortunately, even their poetry seems rather prosaic at times.
- “This is no time for making new enemies.” — Voltaire, on his deathbed, when asked to renounce the devil.
- “I won that money on the horses.” — Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Mahon Tribunal, 2007. Any chance you might have kept a copy of the betting slip, Bertie, just for the record.
- “I think those Indians are friendly.” — General Custer, at Little Bighorn in 1876, shortly before the massacre. All those preaching renegotiation with IMF/ECB please take note.
- “The biggest regret of my political career is that I didn’t manage to build the national stadium at Abbotstown; especially when you look at countries like Qatar and Kuwait, and all the stadiums they have.” — Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern outside Leinster House on his last day as a TD, February 2011. We have to ask ourselves what we did with all our oil, and why we didn’t put it to such good use as dem Arabs.
- “Senior people have forgotten that the government has certain powers; they can conscript people, they can send them off to certain death. They can change the law.” Professor Morgan Kelly, to Vanity Fair magazine, January 2010. Aren’t we lucky that he didn’t tell Bertie?
- There’s also an apocryphal story about the meeting between US president John F Kennedy and Russian leader Nikita Kruschev in 1961. At one point, the discussions became quite heated, with Kennedy exclaiming, “Do you ever admit a mistake?” “Certainly,” said Kruschev, “in a speech before the 20th Party Congress, I admitted all of Stalin’s mistakes”.
- “The people have spoken. I am their leader. I must follow them.” — Jim Hacker, in the television series Yes Minister.
- The classics stand the test of time too: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.
“On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.” — Brutus in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, 1599.
- An interesting take from Nye Bevan in 1952, describing the impressions of a new Labour MP arriving in the Commons for the first time: “His (sic) first impression is that he is in church. The vaulted roofs and stained-glass windows, the rows of statues of great statesmen of the past, the echoing halls, the soft-footed attendants and the whispered conversation, contrast depressingly with the crowded meetings and the clang and the clash of hot opinions he has left behind in his election campaign. Here he is, a tribune of the people, coming to make his voice heard in the seats of power. Instead, it seems he is expected to worship: and the most conservative of all religions — ancestor worship.”
- Those of the emerging left would also do well to keep in mind Robert Skiddlesky’s observation that “Socialism explains the past and promises the future; it has nothing to offer the present.’’
- And also the old maxim that “A person who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and a person who is still a socialist at 40 has no head.”
- And finally, to end on a positive — good old Sophocles, for those retiring politicians, “one must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been”.
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