Quotes About Politics

I have got instincts that, I think, are very much in tune with people's very keen sense to see something different. I did not dream of being in politics since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I was not involved in student politics, or not in that partisan way.

Identity politics contains a trap. Of all the reasons to be wary of religious leaders asking the state to suspend freedom of speech to spare their tender feelings, not the smallest is that selective censorship leaves liberals with no argument against sectarians from the dominant denomination or ethnic group.

Almost every word in the paper followed the conservative line, and you wouldn't have been surprised to read in the horoscope that 'A full moon in July will mean that Geminis will be mugged by the feral children of a heroin-addled single mother.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues. GEORGE ORWELL, 1946

I feel like a class traitor when I say it but the first lesson from the 'heroic' age of the Left in the Thirties is that it never works like that in a conflict in which your own society is involved. You can be a critical friend of one side or another, a very critical friend as often as not, but you have to choose which side you are on, and those who don't usually end up as the biggest villains of all.

He heard of the generals Saddam had shot for lowering his prestige by losing battles and the generals Saddam had shot for rivalling his prestige by winning battles.

Rushdie Affair became the Dreyfus Affair of our age because it revealed how, when faced the threat of violence, ordinary political categories collapse.

After Rushdie, the fear of a knife in the ribs or a bomb at the office meant that liberals who stuck by liberalism were in the wrong. They knew the consequences now. If someone killed them, they were guilty of provoking their own murder. In the eyes of most politicians and most of the journalists, broadcasters, academics and intellectuals whose livelihoods depended on the freedom to debate and criticise, the targets of religious violence had no one to blame but themselves.

The politically committed are like football fans. They support their side come what may and refuse to see any good in the opposing team.

the principal role of conservatism in modern politics is to be humiliated. That is what a perpetual loyal opposition, or court jester, is for.

After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace

As soon as politicians have learnt to buy political support from the 'public purse', and conditioned electorates to embrace looting and bribery, the democratic process reduces itself to the formation of (Mancur Olson's) 'distributional coalitions' – electoral majorities mortared together by common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft.

The only real downside to all of this was not to appear for another thirteen years. In the brave new, and very middle-class, alternative world, mainstream politics were rather neglected. By the time anyone realised, it was too late. The wallflowers, who had been left out of all the fun in the Sixties, got their own back during the 1980s by gaining control of the country and vandalising the health service, education, libraries and any other cultural institutions they could get their hands on.

The legacy of Democrats and Republicans approaches: Libertarianism by bankruptcy.

So the "great man" named Rudolph Giuliani made ladies' titties illegal.

The only dangerous thing about ignoramuses is when they vote for ignoramuses.

The prime minister had abused his position as minister in charge of the SIS to embarrass another politician only months before an election.

Cameron Slater: he is a very silly man, because I could stop the people who are going against him. But now, he is just going to get double. Judith Collins: you know the rule. always reward with Double. Cameron Slater: i learned the rule from you! Double it is. Judith Collins: If you can't be loved, then best to be feared.15

Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.

Wise politics is the art of invigorating society and weakening the State.

A partisan of equality who is not envious can only be so because he is stupid.

The cause of democracy's stupidities is confidence in the anonymous citizen; and the cause of its crimes is the anonymous citizen's confidence in himself.

Het volkse verwarren met het democratische is de strategie van de democraat.

Universal suffrage in the end does not recognize any of the individual's rights except the "right" to be alternately oppressor or oppressed.