Quotes About Politics

D. C. Stephenson was telling the state's top elected officials what to do. And they followed the Klansman's every order.

Jim Crow was a bipartisan crime.

Must-watch documentary The Gatekeepers (2012)

so many bad ideas that lead to authoritarian consequences begin with good intentions.

Words That Work, written by Republican political strategist Frank Luntz.

America is divided by a great argument about itself. Europe is divided by a great argument about America.

Well, that's the way democracy works. We have to build this Europe with the material we have at our disposal. And this material is national democracy.

Ordinary Americans, and especially the small minority active in Democrat and Republican primaries, must learn more of what people across the globe are thinking and saying about the US. For if you follow that, you realise that the erosion of American power is happening faster than most of us predicted -- while the politicians in Washington behave like rutting stags with locked antlers.

Criminals/sinners-from the Black Panthers to FBI chiefs and White House Officials-appear on the scene, make their play, and get dragged off stage, but the lawyers remain, administrating and profiting from the action and booking the next show.

Post-truth is pre-fascism.

The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more free speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens.

Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. When

Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country's history, which (thus far) it has been.

The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma. So

Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.

We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy...We imbibed the myth of an "end of history". In doing so, we lowered our defences, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.

A nationalist...is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.

Some believed that Satan had come to earth in human form as a party activist, his collective farm register a book of hell, promising torment and damnation.

In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction.

The politics of inevitability is an intellectual coma we put ourselves in.

In politics, being deceived is no excuse. —LESZEK KO?AKOWSKI

Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president politically. Reality television must become most dramatic with each episode. If we found a video of the president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with the president wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth.

To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.