Quotes About Politics

Everybody in the U.S... should force their country... please, don't, do this. [re Iran]

Mencius observes that the main cause of conflict in the political arena is the abandonment of righteousness as the raison d'être for the ruling minority to enjoy privilege and status without involving themselves in productive labor. Any attempt to profit unjustly or abuse their power in this way in fact makes their legitimate claim to leadership suspect. Their ability to govern is undermined and the public sphere over which they reign becomes privatized.

I want either less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.

What kind of justice is this? Where the poor go to prison and the rich go free. Where witnesses are rented, bought, or bribed. Where people are tried not because of any criminal actions but because of their political beliefs.

The anthropologist Lawrence Cohen describes conferences and conventions not so much as scholarly goings-on but as carnivals—"colossal events where academic proceedings are overshadowed by professional politics, ritual enactments of disciplinary boundaries, sexual liminality, tourism and trade, personal and national rivalries, the care and feeding of professional kinship, and the sheer enormity of discourse.

Anyone in England who puts himself forward to be elected to a position of political power is almost bound to be socially or emotionally insecure, or criminally motivated, or mad.

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night.

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters.

Living a self-conscious life, under the pressure of time, I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all my life's decisions and actions. And it does not matter whether this death comes next week or thirty years from now, this consciousness gives my life another breadth. It helps shape the words I speak, the way I love, my politics of action, the strength of my vision and purpose, the depth of my appreciation of living.

To view the opposition as dangerous is to misunderstand the basic concepts of democracy. To oppress the opposition is to assault the very foundation of democracy.

In one of her letters she writes: Some have questioned the appropriateness of talking about such matters as metta (loving-kindness) and thissa (truth) in the political context. But politics is about people and what we had seen … proved that love and truth can move people more strongly than any form of coercion.

But even amid such stirring events, those two scourges of Burmese politics, factionalism and jealousy, began to cast their shadow.

I was thirty-five and I'd thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I'd been playing in some other game I didn't even know about. Like I'd been holding a hand of kings and then the people around the table started putting down more kings, a king with a squid's face, a naked king with goat's horns holding up a bough of holly. A Russian king with an insect's voice.

Frustrated at never being able to figure out which silver Prius was mine, I put a second Obama sticker on the bumper, because having only one made it indistinguishable from the rest. I suppose, if I really wanted to make it easier to find, I'd slap a National Rifle Association sticker on it.

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

Politically, the goal of today's dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.

People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.

What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that anything I do is right because I chose to do it, is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality--so the notion that anything society does is right because society chose to do it, is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles an the banishment of morality from social issues.

A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war.

acuérdate de otro detalle: los comunistas no tienen el menor respeto por los que cambian de camisa»

Politics have long been defined as "the systematic organization of hatreds.

Yet what difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same." —ARISTOTLE

Cicero's take on official Rome was less flattering: "A more raffish assemblage never sat down in a low-grade music hall," he huffed

John Jay would offer the best analysis later, to George Washington: "There is as much intrigue in this state house as in the Vatican, but as little secrecy as in a boarding school.