Quotes About Influence

the media, like the politicians, do not take note of rebellion until it is too large to be ignored.

Democrats and Republicans to elect Rutherford Hayes in 1877 set the tone. Whether Democrats or Republicans won, national policy would not change in any important way.

The good things that have been done, the reforms . . . all of that was not done by government edict. . . . It was all done by citizens' movements. And then keep in mind that great movements in the past have arisen from small movements, from tiny clusters of people that have gotten together here and there. If you have a movement strong enough, it doesn't matter who's in the White House. What really matters is what are people doing, and what are people saying, what are people demanding.

Then Gregory lowered his voice, suddenly serious. "But it looks like we got to do it the hard way, and stay down here, and educate them.

King's stress on love and nonviolence was powerfully effective in building a sympathetic following throughout the nation, among whites as well as blacks.

Money (before he became a Supreme Court justice), wrote: "They control the people through the people's own money.

They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among savior, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.

By 1850, fifteen Boston families called the "Associates" controlled 20 percent of the cotton spindleage in the United States, 39 percent of insurance capital in Massachusetts, 40 percent of banking resources in Boston.

The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however, the Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and poor. For, if some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had the land, the money, the newspapers, the church, the educational system -how could voting, however broad, cut into such power?

They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.

In short, Beard said, the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates.

Among her female friends, lesbians were particularly prominent: her closest friends in New York were Elsie de Wolfe and her partner, the theatrical agent Bessie Marbury, as well as Anne Morgan and her lover Ann Harriman Vanderbilt, and in Paris she was friendly with the lesbian novelist Natalie Barney and her circle. Lucy admired these independent, forthright women, and according to Randy Bryan Bigham, "a sexual ambiguity on Lucy's part is possible.

The character of the architectural forms and spaces which all people habitually encounter are powerful agencies in determining the nature of their thoughts, their emotions and their actions, however unconscious of this they may be.

Books have a way of dwelling like parasites, carried forth in the minds of readers, turning up by force of succession in later works of art. I was part of that living chain of ideas reaching into the future.

America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable

The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.

The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.

Politics is the Art of Controlling Your Enviroment.

All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.

How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

Assassins, like politicians and journalists, are not attracted to losers.

I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally.

A week earlier I'd been locked into the idea that the Redskins would win easily -- but when Nixon came out for them and George Allen began televising his prayer meetings I decided that any team with both God and Nixon on their side was fucked from start.

Even now, more than 30 years later, I still judge people on the basis of whether they voted for Jack Kennedy in 1960, or for Richard Nixon...Those bastards are scarred forever, and I'm not. At least not for that. Hell, it was an honor to be able to vote against Richard Nixon - and it will be an honor on November 3 [1992] to vote against George Bush and everything he stands for.