Quotes About Politics

Thomas Macaulay's History of England

Around the world, countries flush with cash but poor in arable land are now rushing to secure vast amounts of acreage in land-rich but underdeveloped nations. In theory, of course, such trades could benefit both sides, but in practice they usually raise extraordinarily troubling ethical and political questions. What

The next war in our region will be over the waters of the Nile, not politics," observed Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Egypt's minister of state for foreign affairs, in 1988.

The majority of our polities, as Aristotle says, are like the Cyclops, abandoning the guidance of the women and children to each individual man according to his mad and injudicious ideas: hardly any, except the polities of Sparta and of Crete, have entrusted the education of children to their laws.

Any instruction which convince people that religious belief alone, without morality, suffices to satisfy God's justice is destructive of all government and is far more harmful than is ingenious and subtle. Men's practices reveal an extraordinary distinction between devotion and sense of right and wrong.

The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government. Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated...

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body

Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.

A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas… on the soft fibers of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires.

For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question

Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.

In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king... we must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.

But it must not be forgotten that 'politics' has been conceived as a continuation, if not exactly and directly of war, at least of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil disorder.

Toda esa atención charlatana con la que hacemos ruido en torno de la sexualidad desde hace dos o tres siglos, ¿no está dirigida a una preocupación elemental: asegurar la población, reproducir la fuerza de trabajo, mantener la forma de las relaciones sociales, en síntesis: montar una sexualidad económicamente útil y políticamente conservadora?

During the years 1945-1965, there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud.

Qui, au fond, a eu l'idée de retourner le principe de Clausewitz, qui a eu l'idée de dire : il se peut bien que la guerre soit la politique menée par d'autres moyens, mais la politique elle-même n'est-elle pas la guerre menée par d'autres moyens?

Why have these innovations not taken place? I hesitate to accuse philosophers (I consider myself to be one of them), although their vocation is to anticipate the knowledges and practices to come, and it seems to me that they have failed in this task. Preoccupied with day-to-day politics, they have not perceived the arrival of the contemporary.

Las escuelas de derecho no deben ser espacios inmunes a la discusión política que se da en la sociedad.

Some kind of worship of the state, as though the state was somehow different from the schmucks who run it. Can't say I'm keen.

Military force should never be used for its own sake, but always to achieve a political objective.

I had managed to live this long not knowing any Russians, not really, and yet now my life was crawling with them, like I was an election they wanted to hack.

Teaching social science is at its best meant assisting students in making connections across time and place, both seeking common humanity and coming to understand broad historical and political forces.

Conservatives believe in equality of opportunity. Liberals believe in equality of outcome.

She fell back on the blandest of questions a politician's daughter knew. "So, do you like what your legislator is doing? You plan to vote for him next election?