Quotes About Politics

Elections are a Western jerk-off.

On one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find, we penetrate it, we destroy it. On the other hand, there is a much bigger need for a political solution.

Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall -- just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.

The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.

Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go.

For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.

The politicians always told us that the Cold War stand-off could only change by way of nuclear war. None of them believed that such systemic change was possible.

Get the United States to start a war so they won't intrude in yours.

and listened to one of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch crime novels. Bosch was an LAPD detective who, over a thirty-year career that spanned about as many books, solved one major murder after another and yet his bosses still doubted his skill and integrity, regularly undermined his work, and repeatedly investigated him for misconduct. It frustrated her even more than it did him. His problem, she thought, was that he didn't know how to play politics.

Don't take me for a fool, Eve. That's not why you did it. You made a political calculation. You know that the DA hates me and wants to be the next mayor. You figured that aligning yourself with him would benefit you more than being tied to a sheriff who is already smeared by a prison-beating scandal.

Burnside laughed. "Oh please. You wouldn't be in homicide, and we wouldn't be having this conversation, if you didn't play politics and play it well." The prosecutor put her pad back in her briefcase, opened the door, and started to get out of the car, when she had another thought. "By the way, I see Cobie Smulders playing me in the TV series.

I've been married to one Marxist and one Fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.

I was married to a Fascist and I was married to a Marxist and neither one of them ever took out the garbage.

To straddle the middle ground and win elections, we have to be in charge of the political agenda. This can only be done by not being beaten in the argument with our critics. They complain that I come down too hard on their arguments. But wrong ideas have to be challenged before they influence public opinion and make for problems. Those who try to be clever at the expense of the government should not complain if my replies are as sharp as their criticisms.

Political reform need not go hand in hand with economic liberalisation. I do not believe that if you are libertarian, full of diverse opinions, full of competing ideas in the market place, full of sound and fury, therefore you will succeed.

That was the year the British decided to get out and sell everything. So I immediately held an election. I knew the people will be dead scared. And I won my bet big-time. The gullible fools!

Demography, not democracy, will be the most critical factor for security and growth in the 21st century

Political systems that yield inferior economic performance will ultimately be discarded for those that are more productive

The so-called Real World. Human misery and sadness. Blind politics and general cruelty.

Over the years I had convinced myself that brutality required motive, but this is a fool's deceit. Cruelty is the motive; religion and politics and resources are simply the cloth man weaves to curtain his desires for violence.

In politics and in war, monsters are defined by which side of a fight a man claims. He is still a man to those who share his beliefs, perhaps even a hero. To those that oppose his philosophy, he is a beast, a creature, one of a thousand unspeakable demons clashing over an ideal.

Hippies survived Nixon, but punk caved in to Ronald Reagan, know what I'm saying? Punk actually couldn't take a good challenge.

As long as there are crazed or crafty leaders to play on old fears, a mob will turn cruel.