Quotes by Authors - Page 265

I think this business of good vs. evil is of no interest to the power hungry
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Is human dignity and human life so cheap that the rights protecting it can be traded away to appease the appetite for intimidation and prejudice of a vicious and self-centered group - for whatever reason, power, politics, nationalism, or unity?
Christina Engela
A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.
Robert Harris
So how do the people resist unjust authority, which, we all agree, they must and should do and have done in the past? The best solution anyone has come up with is to say that violent revolutions can be avoided (and therefore, violent mobs legitimately suppressed) if 'the people' are understood to have the right to challenge the laws through nonviolent civil disobedience.
David Graeber
The Corrupt Officer has a Price and the Honest Officer has Integrity
Gary York
To know the good from the bad, study a man or woman's history of actions, not their record of intentions.
Suzy Kassem
Just because there is change around us does not mean there has to be change within us.
Toni Sorenson
There are hundreds of intelligent and big brains in every country in the world to run that country successfully but somehow and often either an immoral stupid or a charlatan imbecile comes to power!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is not only the unit vote for the Presidency we are talking about, but a whole solar system of governmental power. If it is proposed to change the balance of power of one of the elements of the solar system, it is necessary to consider the others.
John F Kennedy
Becoming a part of a movement doesn't help anybody think clearly.
Sam Harris
…95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil […] Political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened…. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying… How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.
David Foster Wallace
The 2016 cyberattack was not just another case of simple Kompromat - meddling in the political affairs of a satellite nation or an individual dissenter. It was a direct attempt to hijack and derail the traditional processes and norms that held the United States together for more than 240 years. The attempt was even more brazen due to the apparent belief that Putin assumed that he and his oligarchy could charm, groom and select a candidate, then with the right amount of cybercrime and enough organized propaganda they could actually choose a president of the United States to do their bidding.
Malcolm Nance
The Earth orbits round tables.
Ljupka Cvetanova
Several centuries ago the greatest writer in history described the two most menacing clouds that hang over human government and human society as "malice domestic and fierce foreign war." We are not rid of these dangers but we can summon our intelligence to meet them.Never was there more genuine reason for Americans to face down these two causes of fear. "Malice domestic" from time to time will come to you in the shape of those who would raise false issues, pervert facts, preach the gospel of hate, and minimize the importance of public action to secure human rights or spiritual ideals. There are those today who would sow these seeds, but your answer to them is in the possession of the plain facts of our present condition.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
In addition, when they talked as if city people lived by different values, they were not emphasizing abortion, or gay marriage, or the things that are typically pointed to as the cultural issues that divide lower-income whites from the Democratic Party. Instead, the values they talked about were intertwined with economic concerns.
Katherine J. Cramer
Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise for them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feeling will pervade the Galaxy that only what a man can grasp for himself at that moment will be of any account. Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds.
Isaac Asimov
We elected a man who knows how to build walls when we needed someone who knows how to build bridges.
DaShanne Stokes
If the caged birds think whoever scattering grains for them that person is their deity,what should we Kurds call the person who will grantee us an independence.
Davan Yahya Khalil
I've fought for religious freedom and I can tell you that anti-gay 'religious freedom' bills aren't it.
DaShanne Stokes
Denying the popular vote is un-American and anti-democratic.
DaShanne Stokes
Electing a bigot enables further bigotry.
DaShanne Stokes
If you lay with a scorpion, don't be surprised when it finally stings you.
DaShanne Stokes
Fascism thrives in obscurity and darkness.
DaShanne Stokes
Accepting fraud from our leaders means accepting fraud in our personal lives.
DaShanne Stokes
No matter their party, people with a conflict of interest should be banned from the Electoral College.
DaShanne Stokes
Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power.
DaShanne Stokes
We owe our loyalty to each other and to our children's children, not to party politics.
DaShanne Stokes
Utopia confronts reality not with a measured assessment of the possibilities of change but with the demand for change. 'This is the way the world should be.' It refuses to accept current definitions of the possible because it knows these to be part of the reality that it seeks to change... Wilde was right: 'A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.
Krishan Kumar
If you have to stretch that far to reach the justification you want, then perhaps you’re standing upon the wrong pedestal.
Russell J. Dorn
Our democracy should aspire to be more democratic.
DaShanne Stokes
From the day to till the day there are two humans living together they were and they will be involves in political process.
Zaman Ali
Blind party loyalty will be our downfall. We must follow the truth wherever it leads.
DaShanne Stokes
Misfortune never comes singly. It's surrounded by bodyguards.
Ljupka Cvetanova
Our communists aren’t like your communists. In New York they’re always on the street demonstrating, but their demands are absurd. Slash rents! Free groceries and electricity for the poor! They demand that landlords open up their vacant apartments to house the unemployed. They even demand that the Communist Party distribute unemployment relief instead of the Labor Department. They might as well demand cake and champagne!
Sana Krasikov
Moscow appeared to her as an Asiatic sprawl of twisting streets, wooden shanties, and horse cabs. But already another Moscow was rising up through the chaos of the first. Streets built to accommodate donkey tracks have been torn open and replaced with boulevards broader than two or three Park Avenues. On the sidewalks, pedestrians were being detoured onto planks around enormous construction pits. A smell of sawdust and metal filings hung in the air
Sana Krasikov
The Bolshevik leaders perched atop the Mausoleum were no easier to tell apart than chess pawns. But Florence too was certain that she could recognise the twinkling eyes of Joseph Stalin, which looked down at her each workday from the oil painting above Timofeyev’s desk
Sana Krasikov
Florence imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own
Sana Krasikov
Florence could feel a constriction in her chest…She had been foolish enough to hope that whatever she was walking into would affect no one but herself. Now the truth was catching up with her at the speed of her galloping heartbeat…Now they had summoned her. And they knew everything
Sana Krasikov
Their courtship unfolded in two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories
Sana Krasikov
Silence is the most expensive to buy.
Ljupka Cvetanova
You are looking at this wrong. You think I hold my territory by the might of my fist. But that's not it. I hold my territory by consent of the governed. I think it is a very American concept, which might be why you never looked for it." — Adam Hauptman, Columbia Basin Pack Alpha, to Iacopo (Jacob) Bonarata, Lord of the Night (master vampire of Milan)
Patricia Briggs
As neoliberalism wages war on public goods and the very idea of a public, including citizenship beyond membership, it dramatically thins public life without killing politics. Struggles remain over power, hegemonic values, resources, and future trajectories. This persistence of politics amid the destruction of public life and especially educated public life, combined with the marketization of the political sphere, is part of what makes contemporary politics peculiarly unappealing and toxic— full of ranting and posturing, emptied of intellectual seriousness, pandering to an uneducated and manipulable electorate and a celebrity-and-scandal-hungry corporate media. Neoliberalism generates a condition of politics absent democratic institutions that would support a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best: informed passion, respectful deliberation, aspirational sovereignty, sharp containment of powers that would overrule or undermine it.
Wendy Brown
When you're dealing with frauds and liars, listen more to what they don't say than what they do.
DaShanne Stokes
A nation with a thousand awakened citizens and a corrupt leader, is much more alive than a nation with an awakened leader and a thousand corrupt citizens.
Abhijit Naskar
Our minds become slaves to those we see as having total power to control us and to cause pain to us. We are quick to give up control of ourselves to those who have the power to rule us as long as they also have the power to feed us. This is the fundamental construct of a feudal society.
Majid Kazmi
When you're a kid, the world can be bounded in a nutshell. In geographical terms, a child's universe is a space that comprises home, school and—possibly—the neighbourhood where your cousins or your grandparents live. In my case, the universe sat comfortably within a small area of Flores that ran from the junction of Boyacá and Avellaneda (my house), to the Plaza Flores (my school). My only forays beyond the area were when we went on holiday (to Córdoba or Bariloche or to the beach) or occasional, increasingly rare visits to my grandparents' farm in Dorrego, in the province of Buenos Aires.We get our fist glimpse of the big wide world from those we love unconditionally. If we see our elders suffer because they cannot get a job, or see them demoted, or working for a pittance, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the world outside is cruel and brutal. (This is politics.) If we hear our parents bad-mouthing certain politicians and agreeing with their opponents, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the former are bad guys and the latter are good guys. (This is politics.) If we observe palpable fear in our parents at the very sight of soldiers and policemen, our compassion translates our observations and we conclude that, though all children have bogeymen, ours wear uniforms. (This is politics.)
Marcelo Figueras
If you voted for a man who said "Grab em by the pussy," you have zero room to claim to protect anyone in bathrooms.
DaShanne Stokes
Politics, it's all corrupt!
Steven Magee
Cruel people are not only people who kill innocent people with guns. Individuals who steal from government coffers to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor are grossly cruel.
Israelmore Ayivor
Violence only attacks the body, but it is non-violence that has the power to influence the soul and reshape it towards a peaceful future.
Abhijit Naskar
Violence isn't a Democrat or Republican problem. It's an American problem, requiring an American solution.
DaShanne Stokes
My commitment is to urge us all toward moderation and good will toward fellow citizens. If we can set aside unworthy emotions that deepen our political divide, concentrate on finding solutions to the problems our country and communities face, we can then work toward a brighter future with less rancor but firm in our purpose. Or, we can feed our primitive fight or flight impulse by lashing out in social media and then duck into our silos. If we do that, the unhealthy polarization of the time of Trump will get even worse.
Jeff Rasley
The man was a bully. A bully who'd elevated himself to a high-level position, but a bully just the same. No amount of flattery would change how I saw him.
Gwenda Bond
I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.
Jim Garrison
Failing to indict a criminal sitting president sends the message that those in power are above the law.
DaShanne Stokes
A president cannot defend a nation if he is not held accountable to its laws.
DaShanne Stokes
I would rather contend with an honest asshole than a duplicitous diplomat.
A.E. Samaan
There is never a moment where I find Trump persuasive. When I look at him I see a man without any inner life. I see the most superficial person on Earth. This is a guy who has been totally hollowed out by greed and self regard and delusion. The way he talks about himself; if I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window. That barely overstates it. Do you remember that scene at the end of the in The Exorcist where the priest is driving out the devil from Linda Blair and the devil comes into him and he just hurls himself out the window to end all the madness? Well, it would be like that. - Sam Harris
Sam Harris
People spread gossips, calumny, and false accusations to destroy their subject victim's integrity. Question the motive of people who erroneously, offensively, defensively, intrusively, abusively and intentionally brand you as a threat, a risk or a danger to life or security. ~ Angelica Hopes, K.H. Trilogy
Angelica Hopes
Discrimination does not 'make America great.' It makes America weak.
DaShanne Stokes