Quotes About Politics

United States willing to confront the royal families of neighboring energy-rich kingdoms such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, even when sections of those governments also appeased and nurtured al Qaeda.

By 2001, however, India was decoupling from its long rivalry with Pakistan. India's economy was booming. Its generals and foreign policy strategists professed to be more concerned about China than about their dysfunctional sibling neighbor to the west. Yet the Pakistan Army used fear of India as a justification for dominating Pakistan's politics.

Musharraf considered the Taliban's emir, Mullah Mohammad Omar, to be a stubborn man with a tenuous grasp of international politics. Negotiating with him, Musharraf had found, was like "banging one's head against the wall.

Musharraf told Wendy Chamberlin at Army House that a postwar government in Afghanistan, in addition to being "pro-Pakistan," should also be "Pashtun dominated."15 For two decades, I.S.I. had tried to control Islamist Pashtun parties to influence Afghan politics; it was not about to stop now.

Massoud doubted they had time. "If President Bush doesn't help us," he told a press conference in Strasbourg a few days later, "then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon—and it will be too late."5

Clinton's relationship with the CIA during his first term: distant, mutually ill-informed, and strangely nonchalant.

Afghans believe that if their country is to be sold to Pakistan they would prefer to bargain over the price directly rather than rely on an agent," meaning the United States, Rubin wrote.17

Panetta dined with Pasha and Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widow, who shared authority uneasily with the army. Zardari made jokes about I.S.I.'s pervasive surveillance of him—jokes that sounded paranoid but were grounded in fact. "Ahmed knows everything I think and everything I say," Zardari remarked of the I.S.I. chief sitting near him. "I walk into my office every morning and say, 'Hello, Ahmed!

American tolerance of the Taliban was publicly and inextricably linked to the financial goals of an oil corporation.

One view at the highest levels of the U.S. embassy in Kabul by summer's end was that Karzai "was a very clever madman—just because he was insane doesn't mean he was stupid.

As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival, the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion, a subject his country is profoundly unprepared to contemplate.

America is in moral and spiritual decline—and your favorite candidate or political party isn't going to fix it. Why are we in decline? The answer is that God has given us over to reprobate minds. A reprobate mind is one that doesn't use reason or discernment. It suppresses truth instead of embracing truth—just

We live in a time where increasingly our national leaders are more like dons of crime than statesmen, where notions of plausible deniability replace truth, and claims that politicians never knew of evil done in their own names by others are commonplace. It is the age of unbridled arrogance and video showmanship, where the challenge ' prove what I knew and when I knew it ' has become a national motto.

What made him mad was the constant drumming on CNN, telling everybody that the economy was just fine. The news media, or whatever they were calling themselves these days, had become nothing but a mouthpiece for the federal government, parroting press releases from the White House. If the president took a crap in public, they'd report that he shit gold bricks. If

the Eagle, had compromised and as a consequence owned nearly a third of the key positions in the House and almost as many in the Senate.

Government can do whatever it wants, kick the crap out of their political opponents while ignoring the crimes committed by their friends.

Maybe they should take a closer look at the people they elect.

The problems we confront today, to the extent that they remain political problems, are precisely the same as those confronted in fifth-century Athens, fifteenth-century Florence, or seventeenth-century England.

The study of political philosophy has always revolved around such questions as "Why should I obey the law?" "What is a citizen and how should he or she be educated?" "Who is a lawgiver?" "What is the relation between freedom and authority?" "How should politics and theology be related?" and perhaps a few of others.

Today it is the hope of many both here and abroad that we might some day overcome the basic structure of regime politics and organize our world around global norms of justice and international law. Is such a hope possible? It cannot be entirely ruled out, but such a world—a world administered by international courts of law, by judges and judicial tribunals—would no longer be a political world. Politics is only possible within the structure of the regime.

the ills of the human race would never end until either those who are sincerely and truly lovers of wisdom come into political power, or the rulers of our cities, by the grace of God, learn true philosophy.3

My kids can do whatever they want as long as they are not Republicans or junkies. That is where I draw the line.

One thing we've learned is that when people, especially politicians, start making decisions based on a reading of their moral compass, facts tend to be among the first casualties.

In the United States especially, politics and economics don't mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.