Quotes About Politics

I'm interested in current affairs and social policy as a whole, but I don't watch politics for sport.

Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.

When Hitler came to power I was in the bath.

There is an art, a deeply political art, of taking circumstances as they arise and attributing them to your side or the opposition, in a constant tallying of reality towards ends of which it is innocent.

Think of submitting our measure to the advice of politicians! I would as soon submit the subject of the equality of a goose to a fox.

In its secular forms, then, this cosmological politics exceeds Christianity; to be an American, you must convert, not to Christianity, but to American democracy.

The bottom line is that 'Russia can either be an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both.'19 If Ukraine does not stay independent, in other words, Russia will not remain a democracy, so Ukrainian independence is as much for Russia's good as Ukraine's. Russians, of course, have some difficulty taking this concept on board.

The (Polish-bom) American Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that 'without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.

I remember abortion being legal in the United States

She [Judith Butler] specifies the ways in which the logic of identity politics—which is to gather together similar subjects so that they can achieve shared aims by mobilising a minority-rights discourse—is far from natural or self-evident. Michael Warner makes a similar point about the cultural specificity of identity politics when observing that, because its 'frame ... belongs to Anglo-American traditions', it therefore 'has some distorting influences'.

Law and Justice took over the state public broadcaster—also in violation of the constitution—firing popular presenters and experienced reporters. Their replacements, recruited from the far-right extremes of the online media, began running straightforward ruling-party propaganda, sprinkled with easily disprovable lies, at taxpayers' expense.

the worst kind of one-party state "invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.

Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to the face of Imperialist warmongers.

This way of speaking—"Putin is a killer, but so are we all"—mirrors Putin's own propaganda, which often states, in so many words, "Okay, Russia is corrupt, but so is everyone else.

No hay una explicación única, y no voy a ofrecer aquí ni una gran teoría ni una solución universal. Pero sí hay un tema de fondo: dadas las condiciones adecuadas, cualquier sociedad puede dar la espalda a la democracia. De hecho, si nos hemos de guiar por la historia, a la larga todas nuestras sociedades lo harán.

Whatever equilibrium your nation reaches, there is always someone, at home or abroad, who has reasons to upset it.

El autoritarismo es algo que atrae simplemente a las personas que no toleran la complejidad: no hay nada intrínseco «de izquierdas» o «de derechas» en ese instinto.

EU or NATO find it extremely hard to make fast decisions or big changes. Unsurprisingly, people are afraid of the changes technology will bring, and also afraid—with good reason—that their political leaders won't be able to cope with them.

The jangling, dissonant sound of modern politics; the anger on cable television and the evening news; the fast pace of social media; the headlines that clash with one another when we scroll through them; the dullness, by contrast, of the bureaucracy and the courts; all of this

autoritarismo es algo que atrae simplemente a las personas que no toleran la complejidad: no hay nada intrínseco «de izquierdas» o «de derechas» en ese instinto. Es meramente antipluralista; recela de las personas con ideas distintas, y es alérgico a los debates acalorados. Resulta irrelevante que quienes lo tienen deriven en última instancia su postura política del marxismo o del nacionalismo. Es una actitud mental, no un conjunto de ideas.

Think about how record companies put together new pop bands: they do market research, they pick the kinds of faces that match, and then they market the band by advertising it to the most favorable demographic. New political parties now operate like that: you can bundle together issues, repackage them, and then market them, using exactly the same kind of targeted messaging—based on exactly the same kind of market research—that you know has worked in other places.

there is a theme: Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.

tratando de aprender a evitar que una nueva democracia se convirtiera en una tiranía.