Perhaps you are a journalist covering the May 7 elections or the Oscar Pistorius trial – and will soon be immersed in Shrien Dewani’s adventures in our specialist niche of the honeymoon-tourism market.
You might be a TV continuity announcer-cum-journalist, circling endlessly between serious discussion about bone fragments, Nkandla’s fire retarding swimming pool, Numsa’s endless exit from Cosatu – and then back to Oscar standing up, Oscar sitting down, Oscar making gagging noises, Oscar weeping about how horrible and sad this whole business is for him.
If you’re very lucky you might get to do a colour piece on Zuma’s ‘shorty and the machine gun’ routine:
But after the 10th showing of that, between the traffic, Oscar Pistorius, the sport, Oscar Pistorius and the economy … and Oscar Pistorius, even you must be having to fight to keep your food in your stomach.
I understand the private honour in doing something deeply distasteful and humiliating when this is the price of earning a living. So, in an attempt to provide us all with some light relief, I hereby republish and rework some ‘cynical quotations’ I have posted on a few occasions previously. Apologies to those long time readers who have seen these more than once … but this is a public service I feel compelled to render.
These are from the excellent Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations (John Green – Cassel, 1994) with a few comments from the peanut gallery.
As we listen to politicians as we head towards May 7
People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.
Otto von Bismarck
There are hardly two Creatures of a more differing Species than the same Man, when he is pretending to a Place, and when he is in possession of it.
George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, Political, Moral and Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflexions, c.1694
An Honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid … because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation.
Bertrand Russel, Presidential Address to LSE students, 1923
Jacob Zuma
An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.
Simon Cameron, 1860
In general, we elect men of the type that subscribes to only one principle – to get re-elected.
Terry M. Townsend, speech 1940
That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.
Woodrow Wilson, 1917
Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he’ll spend two years organising and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
David Broder, in the Washington Post, 1973
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
– P. J. O’Rourke
Should you bother voting at all?
Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
George Jean Nathan
… yes, but (and forgive the emphasis here on the over-cynical … and slightly fascist):
Democracy is the name we give to the people each time we need them.
Robert, Marquis de Flers and Arman de Cavaillet, L’habit vert, 1912
A democracy is a state which recognises the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organisation for the systematic use of violence by one class against another, by one part of the population against another.
V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917
Parliaments are the great lie of our times.
Konstantine Pobedonostsev, 1896
Democracy is a device which ensures that we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
H. L. Mencken, Sententiae, 1916
Now majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But like other precious, sacred things …. it’s not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza.
P. J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores, 1991
The democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything to the level of the herd.
Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H.L. Mencken, 1916
On the ANC and the (infamous) liberal media
Democracy becomes a government of bullies, tempered by editors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1909 – 14
EFF
It is a general error to suppose the loudest complainer for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
Edmund Burke – 1769
What seems to be generosity is often only disguised ambition – which despises small interests to gain great ones.
Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims 1665
Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911
Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1955
Fame is but the breath of the people, that is often unwholesome.
Thomas Fuller 1732
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.
H.L. Mencken 1956
Certain judges
A judge is a lawyer who once knew a politician.
Anonymous
The DA
What a liberal really wants is to bring about change that will not in any way endanger his position.
Stokeley Carmichael
An arbitrary comment about families
Sacred family! …. The supposed home of all the virtues, where innocent children are tortured into their first falsehoods, where wills are broken by parental tyranny, and self-respect smothered by crowded, jostling egos.
August Strindberg 1886
On love – and the current state of the ruling alliance:
The voyage of love is all the sweeter for an outside stateroom and a seat at the Captain’s table.
Henry Haskins 1940
On the global debt crisis and the Great Recession?
What is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?
Bertolt Brecht 1928
or:
A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
-Robert Frost
Bloggers (as a sort of author-lite) – in an attempt to be even-handed in my sneering
An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.
H.L. Mencken, Prejudices 1919-27
Nic Borain 