W. H. Auden Quotes About Politicians

Quotes about: Politicians

• My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

  W. H. Auden

  People, Feelings, Politics

  W H Auden (1981). “Antæus”, Ecco Press

• The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.

  W. H. Auden

  Practice, Justice, Politics

• The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Mistake, Science

  Dyer's Hand (1963) "The Poet and the City"

• The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists

  W. H. Auden

  Men, World, Action

  'The Dyer's Hand' (1963) 'The Poet and the City'

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