Politics Quotes - Page 6

The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the experts consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so. (The proviso is essential, because measures which arouse serious resentment are seldom advantageous, whatever merits they may have otherwise.) The power of the politician, in a democracy, depends upon his adopting the opinions which seem right to the average man. It is useless to urge that politicians ought to be high-minded enough to advocate what enlightened opinion considers good, because if they do they are swept aside for others.

Bertrand Russell

Under every stone lurks a politician.

Aristophanes

A politician has an axe to grindWith which he aims to chop off half your mind.

Chris I. Naylor

People don't have the imagination to understand politicians. People are too innocent

Halldór Laxness

Politicians were famous for double-speak and were consummate liars. That’s why George W. Bush had to be their favorite president. It’s easier to commit a fraud when the actor believes his lie to the point of a conviction

Kenneth Eade

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.

George Packer

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

Alain de Botton

Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.

Vernor Vinge

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...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.

Bertrand Russell

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

Gore Vidal

The American people, and the citizens of all Western nations, have the right to know about every single thing their representatives do on their behalf. After all, elected officials are merely representing those who hold the true power (the people).

James Morcan

Politicians are the sole cause of our incurable social eczema

Munia Khan

Do you know the one about how politics is show business for the ugly? State politics is show business for ugly people who can't remember their lines.

James Browning

The problem with all politicians is that they are human.

Steven Ivy Attorney Entrepreneur

Many people take a very low view of politicians, but that is exactly how they conduct their social interactions daily

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Politics is the only art whose artists regularly disown their masterpieces.

Raheel Farooq

Every politician brings in a wide range of context, promises and characters to bring his mission of you to listen to his words and vote for him and later he won't listen to you at any range.

Auliq-Ice

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going.

Joseph Alois Schumpeter

I wonder how long it takes for these people we elect to forget who they work for?

Dan Groat

Politicians are crooks!

Kenneth Eade

Politics should be a field that attracts statesmen, not future CEO’s and board members.

Kenneth Eade

Donald Trump is nuts, his party is chock full of nuts too, and that is bad news for Americans with a nut allergy.

Steve Merrick

In terms of our elected officials, I think we need to ask...: How far should we go with our need to know before we completely veer off into the personal and the private and leave behind any chance of having a legitimate debate or discussion or discourse about the issues at hand?

John Lewis

Politics is the art of promising heaven and delivering purgatory, and claiming hero status for saving your country from hell.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Sympathy is a characteristic trait of politicians and empathy an emotion of the masses.

Amit Abraham

Without patience, without absence of anger, no one can be called a politician.

Stendhal

... On the whole, the best fortress you can have, is in not being hated by your subjects. If they hate you no fortress will save you...

Niccolò Machiavelli

Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information.

George Eliot

To recognize and comprehend what influences us and others is to function with purpose.

Mark David Henderson

Political tyranny is nothing compared to the social tyranny and a reformer who defies society is a more courageous man than a politician who defies Government.

B.R. Ambedkar

Social change doesn’t happen overnight: It takes decades for momentum to build and for the once-radical edge to become mainstream.

Dr. Jean M. Twenge

I know how easy it is to sound like a corny version of Noam Chomsky when talking about something like this, but in a country where millions of dollars are spent on nuclear weapons, corporate welfare, and many ridiculous things, doesn't it just make sense to take care of people first? As soon as we can make the South Bronx, Compton, Taos, and Astoria look like Beverly Hills I'll have no problem watching a guy orbit Mars.

Dito Montiel

On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress especially for the occasion... None quite voice the thought, but those who came in a steady stream to vote seemed to be saying that India may have fallen far behind its neighbors in the struggle for prosperity, but as long as it can choose its governments, it can hope for better in the future.

Shashi Tharoor

Stable husbanding of the land requires community-wide language and norms for resolving interpersonal conflict, facilitating barter and trade, determining shares of work and output and maintaining organizational hierarchies. Although such social functions are the requisites of community life everywhere, the ways of performing them evolve differently from place to place. Each society develops its practices and sets of myths, symbols and rational justifications, which usually are held to be superior to those of other societies........And just as material reasons for self-sufficiency can turn communities towards economic imperialism, so the ideational justifications for autonomy can turn them into presumptuous civilizers of other peoples.

Seyom Brown

I dream of a world where Science shapes the structure of a society, rather than politics.

Abhijit Naskar

June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary attempt at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in?

Carl Bernstein

No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.

Alexander Cockburn

When journalists are 'accused' of being 'advocates', that means: challenging and deviating from DC orthodoxies.

Glenn Greenwald

It’s true that journalism in reality is not the journalism that we learnt in the university. It is far from it.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.

Anna Politkovskaya

So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.

Stanislav Andreski

If you dare to lose, you will dare to win.

M.F. Moonzajer

Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil … a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons … never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error … Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory. Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.

Fulton J. Sheen

Tolerance. In all my years of debating politics and religion no mind was changed with derision and no thought convicted by way of harshness. You have no right to demand tolerance while deriding others and their beliefs in the process. Want tolerance? Extend it. You’ll be surprised because given it, people will actually listen.

Donna Lynn Hope

In times of long established peace, when the tradition of generations has established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men's minds are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their political forms. It is all part of the humour and the good-humour of life. When one believes that all the tigers in the jungle are dead, it is quite amusing to walk along the jungle paths in a dressing-gown with a fan instead of a gun.

H.G.Wells

They're called 'facts', and my role is to amplify those, not cheerlead. And I don't care at all what you think of my motives.

Glenn Greenwald

Whenever we use our religion, as individuals, or as groups within the church, to act in tandem with political and economic groups that arrest the voice of truth or destroy others, then we are Judas.

Megan McKenna

Never let your Enemies become your Advocates.” by A. K. Hasan

A.K. Hasan

Only a person who perceives that all human beings are important can become a great leader.

Auliq-Ice

...a more open and honest appraisal of the true nature of Silicon Valley and its opportunities as well as the many problems.

David Welch

When libertarian sentiments take a populist form, it looks like this: a mix of anger, fear, anti-intellectualism, and fierce government hostility. Welcome to the Tea Party movement.

David Niose

Where tradition tells us that people are best kept under control and denied freedom of expression and action, humanistic psychology argues for liberation, more open decision-making and a sharing of power and control.

Keith Tudor

Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest and the Holocaust are vulnerable to this kind of concerted denial because of their unfathomability, the unjustifiability, and the threat they pose to the politics of patriarchy and anti-Semitism respectively. Over and over, survivors of the Holocaust attest that they were warned of what was happening in Poland but could not believe it at the time, could not believe it later as it was happening to them, and still to this day cannot believe what they, at the same time, know to have occurred. For Holocaust deniers this is a felicitous twist, for their arguments denying the Holocaust and therefore the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state capitalize on the discrepancies of faded memory. In the case of incest, although post-traumatic stress disorder, amnesia, and dissociation represent some of the mind's strategies for comprehending the incomprehensible, incest deniers have taken advantage of inconsistencies to discredit survivor testimony.

Janet Walker

The distemper of which, as a community, we are sick, should be considered rather as a moral than a political malady.

William Wilberforce

In insisting that personal habit and political action be one and the same, absolutist moralizing limits the possibilities of both.

Heather Paxson

True politics cannot take a single step without first paying homage to morals, and while politics itself is a difficult art, its combination with morals is no art at all; for morals cuts the Gordian knot which politics cannot solve as soon as the two are in conflict.

Immanuel Kant

We also have to consider the many different kinds of rape we have learned about over the past few years as conservative politicians blunder through trying to explain their stances on sexual violence and abortion. For instance, Indiana treasurer Richard Mourdock, running for the US Senate in 2012, said, in a debate, "I struggled with it myself for a long time, and I realized that life is a gift from God, and I think even when life begins int hat horrible situation of rape, that is something God intended to happen." I've been obsessing over these words, and trying to understand how someone who purports to believe in God can also believe that anything born of rape is God-intended. Just as there are many different kinds of rape, there are many different kinds of God. I am also reminded that women, more often than not, are the recipient of God's intentions and must also bear the burdens of these intentions. Mourdock is certainly not alone in offering up opinions about rape. Former Missouri representative Todd Akin believes in "legitimate rape" and the oxymoronic "forcible rape," not to be confused with all that illegitimate rape going on. Ron Paul believes in the existence of "honest rape," but turns a blind eye to the dishonest rapes out there. Former Wisconsin State representative Roger Rivard believes some girls, "they rape so easy." Lest you think these new definitions of rape are only the purview of men, failed Senate candidate Linda McMahon of Connecticut has introduced us to the idea of "emergency rape." Given this bizarre array of new rape definitions, it is hard to reconcile the belief that women are rising when there is still so much in our cultural climate working to hold women down. We can, I suppose, take comfort in knowing that none of these people is in a position of power anymore.

Roxanne Gay

When politics and home life have become one and the same, when economic problems have been solved in such a way that individual and collective interests are identical – all constraints having disappeared – it is evident that we will be in a state of total liverty or anarchy.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you.1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master’s whims. He is often cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on.2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time.3. The master has a group of slave, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on.4. The master allows the slave four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own.5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what use to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on.7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into discussion of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers.8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselve3s to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master may also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.)9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome.The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of the slave?

Robert Nozick

He hadn't killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn't had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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Politics Quotes - Page 6

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