Quotes About Politics

This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.

at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics and literature alike.

None of these countries wanted them: they all had enough Jews already. (None is too many, ministers in Canada and Switzerland said at the time, and other countries felt the same without advertising the fact.)

In the early 1990s, at the beginning of the Taliban regime, there had been a sort of relief that there was some law and order in the country, but that quickly turned bitter when the shariah was enforced.

The Left believes that right-wing tribalism—bigotry, racism—is tearing the country apart. The Right believes that left-wing tribalism—identity politics, political correctness—is tearing the country apart. They are both right.

The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women.

The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too

The new pornography industry is held, by leftist males, to be inherently radical. Sex is claimed by the Left as a leftist phenomenon; the trade in women is most of sex. The politics of liberation are claimed as indigenous to the Left by the Left; central to the politics of liberation is the mass-marketing of material that depicts women being used as whores.

It has often been suggested that Chinese-style, market-oriented reforms are the solution to the North Korean problem.

North Korean rulers do what they are doing not because they are "evil" or driven by some delusionary ideologies, but rather

North Korea is not irrational, and nothing shows this better than its continuing survival against all odds. North Korea is essentially a political living fossil, a relic of an era long gone.

North Korea is a small country with few resources and a moribund economy. In spite of all this, however, it has managed to survive and successfully manipulate larger players, including an impressive number of the great powers.

North Korea's alleged penchant for irrational and erratic behavior is illusionary: the North Korean leaders actually know perfectly well what they are doing. They are neither madmen nor ideological zealots, but rather remarkably efficient and cold-minded calculators, perhaps the best practitioners of Machiavellian politics that can be found in the modern world.

Ann Coulter is living proof that you can't make a silk purse out of a horse's ass

If the political left weren't so joyless, humorless, intrusive, taxing, overtaxing, anarchistic, controlling, rudderless, chaos-prone, pedantic, unrealistic, hypocritical, clueless, politically correct, angry, cruel, sanctimonious, retributive, redistributive, intolerant—and if the political left weren't hell-bent on expansion of said unpleasantness into all aspects of my family's life—the truth is, I would not be in your life.

Military thinkers and actors dominated the new White House and the key departments of state, both military and civilian. Over thirty senior arms industry executives, consultants or advisers were placed in key positions in the military and across government... More than half a dozen important policy positions in the Bush administration were occupied by Lockheed Martin executives, lobbyists or lawyers, reflecting the influence of defence contractors across the breadth of government.

The deal is probably the most corrupt transaction in arms-trading history, with Bandar, Thatcher's son and many others implicated in receiving payments on an epic scale.

Money is paid to them in Germany and the kick-back is transferred to the local military attaché and he transfers it to the princes.' He concluded: 'Not a piece of equipment would go from the US to Saudi without Bandar getting a commission.'13

as the Age of Bush gave way to the Era of Obama, little of substance changed. That was the greatest irony of all.

Like the present-day GOP, the Northern Alliance was a loose coalition of unsavory opportunists, interested chiefly in acquiring power.

Indeed, Greenspan deemed it "fortunate" that "policy decisions in the U.S. have been largely replaced by global market forces," so much so that "national security aside, it hardly makes any difference" whom Americans installed in the White House.9

Americans entrust their security to a class of military professionals who see themselves in many respects as culturally and politically set apart from the rest of society.53

We must look for faith (in anything: God or the self or other people or politics or beauty or just about anything else) and structure. We must help the disenfranchised whose suffering undermines so much of the world's joy—for the sake both of those huddled masses and of the privileged people who lack profound motivation in their own lives. We must practice the business of love, and we must teach it too.

The problem of depression among the poor leads naturally into specific politics. We legislate ideas of illness and treatment in and out of existence.