Quotes About Politics

The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish.

Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least worst. This, for many voters, is the best Clinton can offer.

Pundits on television news programs discuss politics as a horse race or compare the effectiveness of pseudo-events staged by candidates. They do not discuss ideas, issues, or meaningful reform.

There are "no permanent enemies, no permanent allies, only permanent interests,"23 Saul Alinsky often said, paraphrasing the British prime minister Lord Palmerston.

Writing of Ohio megachurch pastor Rod Parsley and his close associate, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, he says, "[T]he heart of the Christian religion, all that is good and compassionate within it, has been tossed aside, ruthlessly gouged out and thrown into a heap with all the other inner organs. Only the shell, the form, remains. Christianity is of no use to Parsley, Blackwell and the others. In its name they kill it.

Corporate totalitarianism, for me, is interchangeable with inverted totalitarianism, as Wolin uses that term throughout his book.

They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power internally that democracy is extinguished. The Constitution remains in place but has been so radically reinterpreted by the courts and by the executive and legislative branches of government, all serving corporate power, as to be essentially nullified.

Putin has a long way to go before he matches the war crimes that we carried out in countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan.

They rigged our political process to thwart popular rule and protect the property rights of the native aristocracy. The laboring classes were to be kept at bay. The electoral college, the original power of the states to appoint senators, and the disenfranchisement of women, Native Americans, African Americans, and men without property locked most people out of the democratic process at the beginning of the republic.

Trump is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy.

The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society's zeitgeist.

A failed democracy, Plato warned, creates the conditions for tyranny based on popular support.

Democrats couldn't care less if people in Indiana hate them. But if Europeans curl their lips, liberals can't look at themselves in the mirror.

As Democrats, when we try to determine who or what allowed Donald Trump to become president, we should look in the mirror.

Anthony Weiner lied to the country about his sexual misconduct online. He also lied to me.

A miserable politics awaits us when the irreligious rot flows downstream.

In the same proportion Russia is the misfortune of Europe and the Israelites.

I think a policy of isolationism toward Cuba is misplaced and hasn't worked.

I miss being governor.

I missed that question on Alaska. I hear they want to make it a state now.

What the media misses is the amount of anger that's out there. Trump didn't create that.

This is what people have been missing: politics shouldn't be about the dour cultishness and pomposity that dominated the left for decades - it should be joyful and exuberant.

I don't have time for politics. There is a mission, and that is to save lives.

It is my mission to put sensible and evidence-based information above politics and exaggeration.