Quotes About Politics

Sheriff Petersen just went right on getting re-elected, a living testimonial to the fact that you can hold an important public office for ever in our country with no qualifications for it but a clean nose, a photogenic face, and a close mouth. If on top of that you look good on a horse, you are unbeatable.

The guardians of the just state should be the most underprivileged of all its citizens. It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

As Plato: It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February?

Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.

Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it's a temporary and local place...

And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like.

Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan's new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people. Even

I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I've written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays . . ., more personal stuff, essays for artists' books, and more. . . . Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists.

The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and writing this book I now see how this is connected to the politics of hope and to those revolutionary days that are the days of creation of the world. Decentralization and direct democracy could, in one definition, be this politic in which people are producers, possessed of power and vision, in an unfinished world.

this administration has been in effect a slow-motion coup, in how it gained power and how it exercises power, violating the rule of law and the standards of the office a little and then a little more and a little more, profiting and wrecking as they go

The US invasion of Iraq, which was supposed to spread democracy throughout the region, actually had the opposite effect.

While the United States claimed to be promoting moderate, secular rebels, in fact the strongest groups held rightist, Islamic views. In

If Cuba is Hell, Miami is Purgatory.

Heresy no longer existed within religion; it was founded in the state.

f white Americans were to leave the country tomorrow, in ten years -America would be a ghetto. You can see the truth of this when you look at many of our major cities that are run by black mayors, black-dominated city councils, and black police chiefs. These cities are usually horrible places to live. Yet blacks who live in black-ruled cities can't see the truth: their own immorality is the cause of black poverty, crime, and family destruction!

Judea is, for all intents and purposes, a temple-state.

The very term "theocracy" was coined specifically to describe Jerusalem.

there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy [...]

In the words of the Iranian political philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, "We no longer claim that a genuinely religious government can be democratic, but that it cannot be otherwise.

No more client-kings. No more King of the Jews. Jerusalem now belonged wholly to Rome.

Bernays set various goals: convince the American people of the Communist presence in Guatemala; convince members of Congress the issue is a winner; convince the CIA, which can actually do something on the ground, it's time to act. Bernays wouldn't make the world better for bananas, he would make the world better for American politicians, who would make the world better for the CIA, which would make the world better for bananas. Indirection.