Politics Quotes - Page 35

I have heard that all ideas of equality are visionary—that they can never be realized—and I believe it. But surely, though there must be hewers of wood, and drawers of water, they ought to have the absolute necessaries of life.

Charlotte Turner Smith

Long ago I decided that at a political meeting the truth usually comes out in just such a speech or a remark ignored at the time because its tone is not that of the meeting. Humorous, or satirical, or even angry or bitter — yet it’s the truth, and all the long speeches and contributions are nonsense.

Doris Lessing

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

We owe our loyalty to each other and to our children's children, not to party politics.

DaShanne Stokes

Fundamentalism of any kind, be it religious, atheistic, political or educational, is the greatest threat to human excellence – it is a threat to progress – it is a threat to greatness.

Abhijit Naskar

Laws forbidding adoptees from accessing their original birth certificates are outdated and need to be changed today.

DaShanne Stokes

Public justice is the greatest kind of show, my brother. Drama. Suspense. And best of all education en masse.

Khaled Hosseini

Truth is hard, propaganda is cheap.

DaShanne Stokes

Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power.

DaShanne Stokes

Social Security is neither social, nor secure.

Edw. C. Young

Why didn't the Democrats accomplish more right after the 2006 elections that gave them control of Congress? It wasn't just that they didn't have votes to override a presidential veto or block a filibuster. They didn't use their mandate to substantially change how the public--and the media-- thought about issues. They just tried to be rational, to devise programs to fit people's interests and the polls. Because there was little understanding of the brain, there was no campaign to change brains. Indeed, the very idea of "changing brains" sounds a little sinister to progressives-- a kind of Frankenstein image comes to mind. It sounds Machiavellian to liberals, like what the Republicans do. But "changing minds" in any deep way always requires changing brains. Once you understand a bit more about how brains work, you will understand that politics is very much about changing brains-- and that it can be highly moral and not the least bit sinister or underhanded.

George Lakoff

No matter their party, people with a conflict of interest should be banned from the Electoral College.

DaShanne Stokes

Accepting fraud from our leaders means accepting fraud in our personal lives.

DaShanne Stokes

A second marked characteristic of the Liberal in debate with the conservative is the tacit premise that debateis ridiculous....Many people shrink from arguments over facts because facts are tedious, because they require a formal familiarity with the subject under discussion, and because they can be ideologically dislocative. Many Liberals accept their opinions, ideas, and evaluations as others accept revealed truths.

William F. Buckley Jr.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace."-Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix

Fascism thrives in obscurity and darkness.

DaShanne Stokes

If you lay with a scorpion, don't be surprised when it finally stings you.

DaShanne Stokes

Don’t be timid. You’re a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present. And begin with the scum in your area, put their backs to the wall.

Elena Ferrante

If this were a courageous country,it would ask Gloria to lead itsince she is sane and funny and beautiful and smartand the National Leaders we've always hadare not.When I listen to her talk about women's rightschildren's rightsmen's rightsI think of the long line of Americans who should have been president, but weren't.Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth.John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo.Imagine President Martin Luther King confrontingthe youthful "Oppie" Oppenheimer. Imagine PresidentMalcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President StevieWonder dealing with the "Truly Needy."Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, orSweet Honey in the Rockdealing with Anything.It is imagining to make us weep with frustration,as we languish under real estate dealers, killers, and bad actors.

Alice Walker

What we call isolation in the political sphere, is called loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse.Isolation and loneliness are not the same"...."While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns life as a whole. Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities.But totalitarian domination as a form of government is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. it bases its self on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is the most radical and desperate experiences of man

Hannah Arendt

He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it— it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That’s politics....

Kim Stanley Robinson

First —we should restrain our anti-colonialist joy here— the question to be raised is: if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing its hegemony? The answer is: 'capitalism with Asian values' (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything to do with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism as such to suspend democracy). From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply 'progressist'. It was always obsessed by the question: what is the price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed; it was just that he insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms. And we should do the same with the progress of global capitalism today: keep in view its dark underside, which is fomenting revolts.What all this implies is that today's conservatives are not really conservative. While fully endorsing capitalism's continuous self-revolutionizing, they just want to make it more efficient by supplementing it with some traditional institutions (religion, for instance) to constrain its destructive consequences for social life and to maintain social cohesion. Today, a true conservative is the one who fully admits the antagonisms and deadlocks of global capitalisms, the one who rejects simple progressivism, and who is attentive to the dark obverse of progress. In this sense, only a radical Leftist can be today a true conservative.

Slavoj Žižek

Each thinking mind is a political mind

Zaman Ali

Blind party loyalty will be our downfall. We must follow the truth wherever it leads.

DaShanne Stokes

Democracy is a continuous, open process of civility.A democracy can never be “done”; updating democracy can never be over.Democracy can be nothing else but a continuous process, because we use it to organize our life, and life is nothing but a continuous process.Democracy can be compared to an operating system or an anti-virus software; if it does not get perpetually updated, it becomes obsolete very fast.Trusting the updates or the “improvements” of democracy to the elected and the owned mass media is like trusting the updates of an anti-virus program to virus creators; it defeats the purpose of updates or improvements.

Haroutioun Bochnakian

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.

Harry G. Frankfurt

Sociopaths are attracted to politics because the see it as a sphere in which you can be ruthless and step all over people. That fact that some politicians can tell such awful lies is another example of sociopathy. Sociopaths lie—they see nothing wrong with it.

Alexander McCall Smith

One cannot enter a State legislature or a prison for felons without becoming, in some measure, a dubious character.

H.L. Mencken

Help yourself with the state! It's on democracy!

Ljupka Cvetanova

Utopia's value lies not in its relation to present practice but in its relation to a possible future. Its "practical" use is to overstep the immediate reality to depict a condition whose clear desirability draws us on, like a magnet.

Krishan Kumar

China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional Marxist–Leninist ideals, but in practice it is guided by Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxims that ‘development is the only hard truth’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice’. Which means, in plain language: do anything it takes to promote economic growth, even if Marx and Lenin wouldn’t have been happy with it. In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city state, they followed this line of thinking even further, and pegged ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, ministers get a raise, as if that is what their job is all about

Yuval Noah Harari

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

Every political mean is imperfect.

Zaman Ali

One of the most important qualities of a president is the ability to inspire, to bring people together for the common good.

DaShanne Stokes

We must acknowledge and take responsibility for the conflicts we have helped to create, and act to create real change. That, after all, is the true hallmark of democracy--a commitment to justice, honest self-appraisal, and action--even when it means challenging ourselves and the political institutions we hold most dear.

DaShanne Stokes

Our democracy should aspire to be more democratic.

DaShanne Stokes

Integrity must become a personal goal of a growing majority in America if we want to be a major world influence.

Herman L Glaess

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

Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.

Doris Lessing

It's easy for common people to say what they think about the government. No one listens to them.

Ljupka Cvetanova

Armour belonging to someone else either chops off you or weighs you down or is too tight

Niccolò Machiavelli

It is going to be too easy for things to start feeling normal—especially if you are someone who is not directly impacted by his actions. So keep reminding yourself:This is not normal.Write it on a Post-It note and stick it on your refrigerator, hire a skywriter once a month, tattoo it on your ass.Because a Klan-backed misogynist internet troll is going to be delivering the next State of the Union address.And that is not normal.It is fucked up.

John Oliver

Silence is the most expensive to buy.

Ljupka Cvetanova

Florence, listen to me carefully. He squeezed her hand. Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place

Sana Krasikov

From the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made itself blind to the death and destruction of the past

Sana Krasikov

Their courtship unfolded in two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories

Sana Krasikov

Was it an instinct towards their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her mind’s eye, was an image of the two of them dancing on the edge of the world, not realising that they were about to fall off

Sana Krasikov

Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he’d stood before, but the caramel color of his coat was unmistakable. He was loitering in front of what looked like a Ford V8 parked nose-up on the sidewalk. Florence adjusted her shawl over her shoulders and crossed to the opposite corner of the plaza. When she turned back to look again, he was gone

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

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

A Red Riding Hood out of her depths in the woods of socialism

Sana Krasikov

She was arriving at a revelation that the secret to living was simply forgetting

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

Sunset was just then settling over Red Square. There seemed some hidden vision to be gleaned. A message about man’s chaotic spirit and his sombre dignity. His dignity and his power. His power and his purpose. She was sure that there was some thread there, but the burden of decoding it made her feel too tired

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

Sergey described the mighty furnaces and plants rising up from the steppes. “How far we’ve come. How much work there is still to do!” She would have to see it herself one day, with her own eyes. Florence reread the last line with a turbulent flip in her stomach. Was this an invitation?

Sana Krasikov

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

An independent newspaper? It is a newspaper that looks nothing like a newspaper.

Ljupka Cvetanova

Misfortune never comes singly. It's surrounded by bodyguards.

Ljupka Cvetanova

Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but incompatible traits.

David Brooks

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Politics Quotes - Page 35

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