Quotes About Politics

The greatest delusion of this generation is that democracy still works when both the Congress and the presidency are blatantly influenced by corporate money.

These acts recall the 1971–72 "Chicken War" between America and Europe, and the grain embargo that quadrupled wheat prices outside of the United States. It was this embargo that inspired OPEC to enact matching increases in oil prices to maintain terms-of-trade parity between oil and foodstuffs. The "oil shock" was simply a reverberation of the U.S. grain shock.

It thus was historically logical that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara should become president of the World Bank upon leaving his position as architect of America's war in Southeast Asia.

it is possible to cause more trouble with a rouble than with a club; it is only political economy that does not want to know it. — Leo Tolstoy, What Shall We Do Then? (1886)

This is the political dimension of the mathematics of compound interest. It is the pro-rentier policy that the French Physiocrats and British liberals sought to reverse by clearing away the legacy of European feudalism.

Campaign donors buy a get out of jail pass... essentially, fraud has been decriminalized.

Today's mainstream political and economic theories deny a positive role for government policy to constrain the large-scale concentration of wealth.

The Godfather, Part III (1990): Vincent Mancini: Don Lucchesi, you are a man of finance and politics. These things I don't understand. Don Lucchesi: You understand guns? Vincent Mancini: Yes. Don Lucchesi: Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.

Human beings seem to have a need to attribute a sacred, or at least quasi-sacred, character to their political bodies, their rulers, and the actions of those entities. One tragic but frequent result is the sacralization of one's own people, whether nation, race, or tribe, and the demonization of the other. Out of such religion comes a culture of hatred and even violence

James Madison's logic in 1787 still holds, a further offering of this form will someday be made available to the world. Madison states: …extend the sphere and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult to all who feel it to discover their own strength and to act in unison with each other.42

A politics of moral engagement is not only a more inspiring ideal than a politics of avoidance. It is also a more promising basis for a just society.

Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else.

Few politicians speak that way today. In the decades after RFK, progressives largely abandoned the politics of community, patriotism, and the dignity of work, and offered instead the rhetoric of rising.

Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else. I think this misreads our predicament. The problem with our politics is not too much moral argument but too little. Our politics is overheated because it is mostly vacant, empty of moral and spiritual content. It fails to engage with big questions that people care about.

For Aristotle, politics is about something higher. It's about learning how to live a good life.

La concepción tecnocrática de la política está ligada a una fe en los mercados; no necesariamente en un capitalismo sin límites, de laissez faire, pero sí en la idea más general de que los mecanismos de mercado son los instrumentos primordiales para conseguir el bien público.

La financiación de las campañas electorales y las hordas de representantes de los lobbies dan a las grandes corporaciones y a las personas ricas poder suficiente para deformar las reglas a su favor.

Here then was the basic argument of liberal and progressive politics in the decades leading up to Brexit, Trump, and the populist revolt: The global economy, as if a fact of nature, had somehow come upon us and was here to stay. The central political question was not how to reconfigure it but how to adapt to it, and how to alleviate its devastating effect on the wages and job prospects of workers outside the charmed circle of the elite professions.

Quienes ensalzan el ideal meritocrático y lo convierten en el centro de su proyecto político pasan por alto esta cuestión moral, pero también ignoran algo más poderoso desde el punto de vista político: las actitudes muy poco atractivas (desde la perspectiva moral) que la ética meritocrática fomenta, tanto entre los ganadores como entre los perdedores. Entre los primeros promueve la soberbia; entre los segundos, la humillación y el resentimiento.

We've come to equate citizenship as an extension of market relations.

Corren tiempos peligrosos para la democracia. Puede apreciarse dicha amenaza en el crecimiento de la xenofobia y del apoyo popular a figuras autocráticas que ponen a prueba los límites de las normas democráticas. Estas tendencias son preocupantes ya de por sí, pero igual de alarmante es el hecho de que los partidos y los políticos tradicionales comprendan tan poco y tan mal el descontento que está agitando las aguas de la política en todo el mundo.

Political debate is often about how to identify and characterize the facts relevant to the controversy in question.

Tenemos que preguntarnos si la solución a nuestro inflamable panorama político es llevar una vida más fiel al principio del mérito o si, por el contrario, debemos encontrarla en la búsqueda de un bien común más allá de tanta clasificación y tanto afán de éxito.

I am involved with politics today because of the inspiration I received from Ronald Reagan.