Quotes About Politics

I didn`t change. The Democratic Party slid to the Left from right under me.

He laid into me with the same gusto as a right-wing political pundit on the O'Reilly Factor defending President's Bush right to vacation six days out of the week.

I didn't really spend much time with anyone my own age during high school because I believed my true calling would be representing New Jersey in the U.S. Senate, and if that didn't work out, I could always fall back on becoming an Olympic pole vaulter.

By the way he reacted, you would have thought I told him that slavery never happened. He laid into me with the same gusto as a right-wing political pundit on the O'Reilly Factor defending President Bush's right to vacation six days out of the week.

What I grew to learn was that Dan didn't want me to talk around my anger and pretend it was all about Donald Trump.

what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance?

The point in all this is that language is a handy whipping boy to summon and belabor when we have failed in some serious way. In other words, we play politics with language, and in so doing conceal the reality and the complexity of our situation from ourselves and from those foolish enough to put their trust in us.

one man with vision—an enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays. But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance?

This does not in any way close the argument for the development of African languages by the intervention of writers and governments. But we do not have to falsify our history in the process. That would be playing politics. The words of the Czech novelist Kundera should ring in our ears: Those who seek power passionately do so not to change the present or the future but the past—to rewrite history. There is no cause for writers to join their ranks.

White racism in Africa, then, is a matter of politics as well as economics. The story of the black man told by the white man has generally been told to serve political and economic ends.

Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency!

Somehow I found myself admiring the man for his lack of modesty. For what is modesty but inverted pride? We all think we are first-class people. Modesty forbids us from saying so ourselves though, presumably, not from wanting to hear it from others. Perhaps it was their impatience with this kind of hypocrisy that made men like Nanga successful politicians while starry-eyed idealists strove vaingloriously to bring into politics niceties and delicate refinements that belonged elsewhere.

We wrote about politics so you can write about daffodils

It's a terrible era when idiots are allowed to govern the blind

Good Lord, half of America was pretty sure their own president was a Russian puppet.

We were separated by years, tastes in music, food, clothes, and politics, but we delighted in baseball.

This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. … It has turned whole nations, such as the United States, into self-consuming machines of death.

There was in the House only one dissenting vote, from Barbara J. Lee, a Democrat from California, who warned that military action could not guarantee the safety of the country and that 'as we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.

The fact that alienated people can be counted on to vent their spleen in ineffectual directions—by fighting among themselves—relieves the government of the need to deal fundamentally with the conditions which cause their frustrations

Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it

The citizen has become irrelevant. He or she can participate in heavily choreographed elections, but the demands of corporations and banks are paramount.

Useless DECEMBER 7, 2009     Liberals are a useless lot.

Money has replaced the vote.

The mantra of the "least worse" does not work—look at the steady deterioration in American politics. The "least worst" paves the way for the worst.