Best 5810 quotes in «politics quotes» category

The essence of Conservatism is fear: fear of what is not understood, fear of change, fear of the new, fear of what's different, fear of the other.

The enemy was not the Klan but the inside-outside lock that racism and classism had on the minds of the people: It operated from the inside through self-hate and self-doubt, and from the outside through the police, carnivorous landlords, and the welfare system.

The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgement of reason, and perverts its liberty.

The era of revolution by military means produced a greater degree of desperation and frustration. This was brought to an end by the people.

The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they reveal.

The Establishment is amassing wealth and aggressively annexing power in a way that has no precedent in modern times. After all, there is nothing to stop it.

The evolution revolution is here. Global sense makes common sense.

The exigencies of maintaining the West Pakistani political, bureaucratic and military elite in power were the major reason why, after Jinnah’s death, the secular Muslim nationalist path was hurriedly abandoned.

The essential question for voters, then, is discerning the nature of the man or woman who will be standing alone at what Kennedy described as the "vital center of action." For, as the Greeks knew, character is destiny.

[...] the "explosion" of Mexicans crossing the border without permission was entirely predictable. It was the inevitable consequence of of policies that slashed opportunities to migrate legally without addressing the forces pushing and pulling people across the line. People who had lived their lives across two countries legally and peacefully for decades were suddenly redefined as invaders and threats. The "Illegal immigrant" was thus invented in Washington, D.C., conjured out of contradiction.

The fact is, race is a constant factor in American life. Yet reacting to every incident, real or imagined, is crippling, tiring, and ultimately counter productive. I grew up in a family that believed that you might not be able to control your circumstances, but you can control your reaction to them. There was no room for being a victim or depending on the white man to take care of you.

The fact is, when men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can isolate them - neither prison walls nor the sod of cemeteries. For single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity will sustain them all.

The fact that corporations constitute what amounts to the governing class today evidences the fact that we are no longer a representative republic; that we are a most ruled people, under the ceaseless control of a government that is for and by the corporations, can no longer be denied. The implications are immense: a transformation of not only our economic but our political organization is necessary.

the fact that every people feel itself threatened by the others gives the state it's definite unifying powers; it depends upon the instinct of self-preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables it to get the upper hand in internal crises

The failure of India's public institutions to keep pace with the dramatic political, economic and social transformations under way has led to severe gaps in governance. The end result of this disjuncture has been a proliferation of grand corruption - a malaise made up of a diverse array of regulatory, extractive, and political rent-seeking activities.

The FDA and the EPA are supposed to be protecting us, not the people who make the poison.

The fate of the Right in the late modern age is to destroy what remains of the past in a vain attempt to recover it.

[T]he Federal Communications Commission should reestablish two principles that formerly served this country well: the public service requirement and the fairness doctrine. Every television and radio station should once again be required to devote a meaningful percentage of its programming to public service broadcasting. The public, after all, owns the airwaves through which signals are broadcast, and the rights-of-way in which cables are strung. And every television and radio station should once again have to follow the fairness doctrine: those with opposing views should have the right to respond to viewpoints expressed on the station.

The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.

[The federal government memo documents] imply a feeling of bureaucratic effrontery as though this child, who hovered between life and death, was some kind of chiseller to the taxpayer.

The feminine political voice is personal. It's intimate. It's caregiving and life enhancing. It's about bringing more love, caring and justice into the world. It's also fierce and determined.

The first grand federalist design...was that of the Bible, most particularly the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament... Biblical thought is federal (from the Latin foedus, covenant) from first to last--from God's covenant with Noah establishing the biblical equivalent of what philosophers were later to term Natural Law to the Jews' reaffirmation of the Sinai covenant under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, thereby adopting the Torah as the constitution of their second commonwealth. The covenant motif is central to the biblical world view, the basis of all relationships, the mechanism for defining and allocating authority, and the foundation of the biblical political teaching.

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

The first woman president has to happen in my lifetime, or I'm going to light this entire planet on fire.

The first word of any constitutional oath of public office by an elected politician should be morality! For only then can the foundations of a strong State become into being and serve its people.

The foundation and cornerstone of state leadership is power of the people.

The foundation of all free government and all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth. Young persons must not only be furnished with knowledge, but they must be accustomed to subordination and subjected to the authority and influence of good principles. It will avail little that youths are made to understand truth and correct principles, unless they are accustomed to submit to be governed by them.

The fools of today's politics keep dividing the lands into more and more pieces, thinking that it would bring their people security, whereas the reality is, such an act only brings insecurity, as it leads to nothing but an increasing amount of conflicts. Division can’t bring peace and security, only assimilation can.

The forgiveness of God flows through me and because I am forgiven, I can forgive.

The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery slope - what is repulsive today is possible to be normal 100 years into tomorrow; the human standard has always been but to push the envelope. In this way, all generations are linked, and one can only hope that every extremist, self-proclaimed progressive is considering this ultimate 'Utopia' to which his kindness will lead at the end of the chain.

The French political class has been relentlessly myopic, if not completely blind, about the concerns of those who work and mine and farm. .... To cite Eugene Weber, "One thing that we learn from history is that people seldom learn from history.

The fourteen million were murdered over the course of only twelve years, between 1933 and 1945, while both Hitler and Stalin were in power.

The French Philosopher of the 16th and the 17th Century, Rene Descartes, had said: "If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." This is the best way for the public to approach whatever it perceives. The only way to resist to deceit. Education and knowledge can help people be more skeptics, but everyone could start by doubting everything and not believing anything. Even the things that seem too obvious or too reliable. I've noticed a tendency to this direction, but I don't know how broad it is. It has to broaden; for humanity's sake. For truth's sake.

...the freedom to bear arms may be righteously rejected to encourage the preservation of all corporeal forms of life.

The fundamental difference between ideology, and its various forms, such as politics, history, religion, ethics, morality, and so on, and science is that the former just offers certain preferences to a person to think and to analyze the reality, but the latter urge a person to abandon all these preferences and neutralize the mind towards reality. Ideology can never be more than subjective valued judgment, but science must be free from this judgment. Ideology is intended for the masses with little, or no rational and analytical thinking, but science for intellectuals for whom rational thinking carries in itself a primary value. The masses can never engage in a genuine science, in similar way, no true intellectual can be an ideologist, because any ideological presupposition would deprive him of his rational and analytical thinking, or reduce it to a considerable extent. Free rational thinking on the base of empirical scientific facts often force you to go against various wide-spread forms of ideology with its all above-mentioned forms.

The fundamentalist picks up the book and says, “Okay, I’m just going to read every word of this and do my best to understand what God wants from me. I’ll leave my personal biases completely out of it.” Conversely, every moderate seems to believe that his interpretation and selective reading of scripture is more accurate than God’s literal words. Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft. It really isn’t hard to write a book that prohibits sexual slavery—you just put in a few lines like “Don’t take sex slaves!” and “When you fight a war and take prisoners, as you inevitably will, don’t rape any of them!” And yet God couldn’t seem to manage it. This is why the approach of a group like the Islamic State holds a certain intellectual appeal (which, admittedly, sounds strange to say) because the most straightforward reading of scripture suggests that Allah advises jihadists to take sex slaves from among the conquered, decapitate their enemies, and so forth.

The future belongs to the socialism which is democratic, to the democracy which is socialist.

The future shouldn't be female or male---but one of women and men working together. That's the real definition of equality.

The fundamental principle of the Russian government has always been the autocratic ruler who combines all legislative and executive powers and disposes of all the nation's resources.

The future does not belong to those who believe in socialism. The future belongs to those who believe in freedom.

The Germans murdered about as many non-Jews as Jews during the war, chiefly by starving Soviet prisoners of war (more than three million) and residents of besieged cities (more than a million) or by shooting civilians in “reprisals” (the better part of a million, chiefly Belarusians and Poles).

The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.

The general ethos of the people they have to govern determines the behaviour of politicians.

The German experience brings us face to face with the major problem of the revolution in Western Europe. In these countries, the old bourgeois mode of production and the centuries-old civilisation which has developed with it have completely impressed themselves upon the thoughts and feelings of the popular masses. Hence, the mentality and inner character of the masses here is quite different from that in the countries of the East, who have not experienced the rule of bourgeois culture; and this is what distinguishes the different courses that the revolution has taken in the East and the West.

The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself.

The Golden Mean is for the weakling, it was not meant for the likes of Alexander the Great, Cyrus, Pharaohs, or Hitlers of the world

The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man's soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value.

The Government is making a fool of itself by attributing all terrorism and acts against the government only to one single patriot

The government is watching me and I am watching the government.

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")