Quotes About Politics

Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East.

Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard and warder.

Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think 'first woman president.' We think—for example—'first ex-co-president' or 'first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent' or 'first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband's perjury rap.

There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.

Some peaceniks clear their throats by saying that, of course, they oppose Saddam Hussein as much as anybody, though not enough to support doing anything about him.

One indictment of the religious right is not that it is heartless – a tautology in any case – but that is brainless.

Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison.

He is in many ways quite a right-wing isolationist. It's because some people are naïve enough to confuse this with anti-imperialism that they think of him as being rather more to the left than he really is.

Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.

Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas.

Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets ... what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified 'white' candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?

No one can deny, in face of the evidence, that it is easy, given military power, to produce a population of fanatical lunatics. It would be equally easy to produce a population of sane and reasonable people, but many governments do not wish to do so, since such people would fail to admire the politicians who are at the head of these governments.

There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness compare with ostentatious antimaterialism.

I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to approach literature and criticism without ignoring the political dimension. Even if I have failed in this synthesis, I have found the attempt worth making.

One feels almost laughably heavy-footed in pointing out that Mrs. Clinton's prim little book, It Takes a Village, proposes sexual abstinence for the young, and that the president was earnestly seconding this very proposal while using an impressionable intern as the physical rather than moral equivalent of a blow-up doll.

Don't write in to ask whether I would prefer Gingrich to Clinton. Ask, rather, whether Clinton prefers Gingrich to you. Go triangulate yourself.

The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.

Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshipped ones do not occupy any positions of political power.

Thus did I begin to see, or thought I began to see, how the British Conservatives kept the fierce, irrational loyalty of those whom they exploited.

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.

every time the secret police close in, our heroes are able to "disapparate"—a term that always makes me think of an attempt at English by George W. Bush.

Religion poisons everything