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[The following is an excerpt from Bertrand Russell’s Presidential Address, The Need for Political Scepticism, which was delivered to the Student’s Union of the London School of Economics and Political Science on October 10, 1923.]

The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates. There is a Gresham’s law in politics as in currency; a man who aims at nobler ends than these will be driven out except in those rare moments (chiefly revolutions) when idealism finds itself in alliance with some powerful movement of selfish passion. Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation. They live by ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ They cannot pay attention to anything difficult to explain, or to anything not involving division (either between nations or within the nation), or to anything that would diminish the power of politicians as a class.

[The following is from J. B. Morton’s Hilaire Belloc: A Memoir, 1955:]

I once made the mistake of talking politics with him. He said: “Politics. Politicians. You know how it is, you see a slimy pond, with a lot of insects swimming around in it, and you go off to bed, and next morning, there they all are, still mucking round in the dirty water. That’s politics. That’s politicians for you.”

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