Quotes About Politics

The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project.

As the progressive Abbé Boulier explained to François Fejtö, when trying to prevent him from writing about the Rajk trial: drawing attention to Communist sins is 'to play the imperialists' game'.11

otherwise—to deny distinctions of class or wealth or influence—is just a way to promote one set of interests above another.

Since anti-Communists ran the gamut from Trotskyists to neo-Fascists, critics of the USSR frequently found themselves sharing a platform or a petition with someone whose politics in other respects they abhorred. Such unholy alliances were a prime target for Soviet polemic and it was sometimes difficult to persuade liberal critics of Communism to voice their opinions in public for fear of being tarred with the brush of reaction.

Among the speakers at the graveside was Viktor Orbán, the young leader of the Young Democrats, who could not help noting that some of the Communists present at Nagy's reburial were the same who, just a few years before, had so strenuously falsified the very revolution whose praises they were now singing.

Politically speaking, ours is an age of the pygmies.

Worse, the language of politics itself has been vacated of substance and meaning.

The democratic failure transcends national boundaries. The embarrassing fiasco of the Copenhagen climate conference of December 2009 is already translating into cynicism and despair among young people:

A differenza della memoria, che conferma e rafforza se stessa, la storia contribuisce al disincanto. Quasi tutto ciò che ha da offrire è sconfortante, addirittura devastante, il che spiega perché non sia sempre politicamente prudente sbandierare il passato come arma con la quale bastonare un popolo per le sue precedenti colpe. Ma la storia dev'essere imparata, e periodicamente imparata di nuovo.

If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear.

The European dilemma is

the center of gravity of political argument in the years after 1945 lay not between left and right but rather within the left: between communists and their sympathizers and the mainstream liberal-social-democratic consensus.

The United Nations showed little initial concern—its inadequate and unconcerned Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, described Bosnia as 'a rich man's war'—

It says something about the mood of the time that a New Labour government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and nearly 11 million voters at the 2001 elections should nonetheless have been moved to respond in this way to the propaganda of a neo-Fascist clique which attracted the support of just 48,000 electors in the country at large: one-fifth of 1 percent of the vote and only 40,000 more votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party. France

Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think.

Silvio Berlusconi, who entered politics not so much to further the national house-cleaning as to ensure that his own business dealings remained safely unaffected.

Blair's new-look politics would not long survive the disastrous decision to embroil his country and his reputation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq—a move which merely reminded foreign observers that New Labour's Third Way was inseparably intertwined with the UK's reluctance to choose between Europe and the United States.

if politi-cians—however well-intentioned—were barred from planning, manipulating, or directing the affairs of their fellow citizens, then extremists of Right and Left alike would be kept at bay.

Margaret Thatcher, like George W. Bush and Tony Blair after her, never hesitated to augment the repressive and information-gathering arms of central government.

V následujících letech Izrael znehodnotí, podkopá a nakonec zni?í význam a využitelnost holokaustu a omezí jej na to, co v nÄ›m již dnes pÃ…â"¢iznanÄ› mnoho lidí vidí, totiž izraelskou výmluvu pro vlastní neblahé po?ínání.

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime efforts. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.

the old ideological Left was part of the problem, not the solution. In

The avowedly politicized language of punk rock bands, exemplified in the Sex Pistols' 1976 hit 'Anarchy in the UK', caught the sour mood of the time. But the punk bands' politics were as one-dimensional as their musical range, the latter all too often restricted to three chords and a single beat and dependent upon volume for its effect.

even if the students of Berkeley, Berlin and Bangalore share a common set of interests, these do not translate into community. Space matters. And politics is a function of space—we