Quotes about politics (6617 quotes, page 48)

“We did not suspend our democracy in our darkest hours why are we suspending it now? the fawning over Thatcher had gone too far. We have had enough of this, It has gone on too long and it has gone too far. This put the tin hat on it the idea that we should suspend a vital part of our democratic process for a party political and private funeral, Mr Churchill didn’t ask for Parliament to be silenced, for confrontations across the House to be forbidden. When our soldiers were being laid waste in the Norway debate, the House of Commons perhaps rose to its finest 20th Century moment. Nobody said: ‘Our armed forces have suffered a disaster, the House of Commons cannot meet, the clash of ideas cannot be heard, we must muffle the drums and silence ourselves The so-called Beast of Bolsover said the argument was about class and that it was "one rule for those at the top and another for those at the bottom. We are here talking about the thing that we sometimes suggest has gone away class, That's what it is, it's about class. It's about the fact that people out there have to live their lives in a different way and there's one rule for those at the top and there's another for those at the bottom. It's never changed, I wish it had, but it hasn't. So when I heard about the chain of events it seemed to grow like topseed - first of all there was going to be some sort of ceremonial funeral, and then the next thing you (Mr Speaker) tell us that the chimes of Big Ben are going to stop and then we hear about the fact that we are going to abandon Prime Minister's question time, I mean, what's it all about? That's why the people out there are angry, a lot of them.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

The Mirror http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/margaret-thatcher-fawning-gone-far-1836314 George Galloway blasts cancellation of PMQs for Margret Thatchers funeral 16 April, 2013

People , Way , Democracy , Idea

“Science is a search for truth –whatever the truth may turn out to be, even if it’s evidently not what we wanted to believe it was. In science, it doesn’t matter what you believe; all that matters is why you believe it. This is why real science disallows faith, promising instead to remain objective, to follow wherever the evidence leads, and either correct or reject any and all errors along the way even if it challenges whatever we think we know now. But creationist organizations post written declarations of their unwavering obligation to uphold and defend their preconceived notions, declaring in advance their refusal to ever to let their minds be changed by any amount of evidence that is ever revealed. Anti-science evangelists display their statement of faith proudly on their own forums, as if admitting to a closed and dishonest mind wasn’t something to ashamed of or beg forgiveness for. They don’t want to do science. They want to un-do science! They try to segregate experimental science from historical science, ignoring the fact that both are based on empirical observations and both can be checked with testable hypotheses. Worse, they want to redefine science in general so that astrology, subjective convictions of faith, and excuses of magic can supplant the scientific method whenever necessary in defense of their beliefs. They’re only open to critical inquiry so long as that is not permitted to challenge the sacred scriptures nor vindicate any of the fields of study to which they’re already opposed. In short, everything science stands for, -or hopes to achieve- is threatened by the political agenda of these superstitious subversives.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc Youtube (April 19, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Truth , Faith , Hope , Way

“If all the 300 (top civil servants and political elite) were to crash in one jumbo jet, then Singapore will disintegrate.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

On how Singapore cannot afford the luxury of multiparty politics, 1975 http://books.google.com/books?id=4dE0AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA322&lpg=PA322&dq=300+were+to+crash+in+one+Jumbo+jet,+then+Singapore+will+disintegrate&source=bl&ots=8x2BWCDeVq&sig=VWl7jJHHDzDXYqLLJw39k8NrEkY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RBbsUsPvF-bSsATvuICoCA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=300%20were%20to%20crash%20in%20one%20Jumbo%20jet%2C%20then%20Singapore%20will%20disintegrate&f=false http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1975/5/13/in-lee-kuan-yews-singapore-prosperity/#
1970s

“With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 191

“I am with all the parties of all trends if their aims are to serve the homeland, freedom and peace. Nothing will keep me far from them, neither religion, political parties, language nor nationality; I am with them and we will always march forward hand in hand in the procession of freedom and peace.”

Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963) Prime Minister of Iraq

Speech delivered at the second congress of the peace partisans (April 14, 1959).
Principles of the 14th July Revolution (1959)

Peace , Religion , Freedom

“A unique opportunity has opened up in Kyrgyzstan to deal with democracy. We started to go toward democracy, and it was interrupted. Now there is a chance to come back to democracy, and in half a year my interim government should prepare elections — open and transparent elections — and we should pass a constitution based on political agreement between the parties. We have quite a task.”

Roza Otunbayeva (1950) Soviet diplomat

"The Situation Is Not Easy" by Lally Weymouth in Newsweek (26 April 2010) http://www.newsweek.com/id/236580/output/print

Democracy , Chance

“The faction fight in the Socialist Workers Party, its conclusion, and the recent formation of the Workers Party have been in my own case, the unavoidable occasion for the review of my own theoretical and political beliefs. This review has shown me that by no stretching of terminology can I regard myself, or permit others to regard me, as a Marxist.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

As cited in: Marcel van der Linden (2007) Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917 http://libcom.org/files/van_der_linden_western_marxism_and_soviet_union.pdf. p. 80
Burnham's Letter of Resignation, 1940

Fight

“I am convinced that the French could not win the war because the internal political situation in Vietnam, weak and confused, badly weakened their military position. I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for. As one Frenchman said to me, "What Vietnam needs is another Syngman Rhee, regardless of all the difficulties the presence of such a personality would entail.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower book Mandate for Change

The White House Years: Mandate for Change: 1953–1956: A Personal Account (1963); longer passage http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/ike1.html quoted at Montclair State University
1960s

War , Feeling , Knowledge , Time

“The performance of business leaders during the next decade will play a major role in determining not only business but political and social trends for a long time to come. Here are some of the principal reasons:
- Business leaders control the economic well-being of and stockholder.
- The course of business shapes public opinion.
- Business leaders shape public opinion.
So, in addition to his or her prime responsibility of managing his or her enterprise at a profit, the business leader of today is faced with new and larger responsibilities. And, at the same time, the job of managing his or her enterprise at a profit is increasing in complexity. Consequently, the imposition of additional responsibilities makes the nation’s task of developing an adequate number of properly equipped executive leaders a staggering one indeed.”

Marvin Bower (1903–2003) American business theorist

Marvin Bower (1949) The development of executive leadership. Harvard University. Graduate School of Business Administration. p. v

Business , Time

“Subject - (1) a person subject to political rule; (2) a free agent, instigator of its activity - subjects can realize themselves as free agents only by means of redoubling themselves as, only in so far as they project, transpose the pure form of their freedom into the very heart of the substance opposed to them; into the person of the subject-monarch as head of state.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

261
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Freedom , Heart , Personality

“Differences in the incidence of destruction and "death" do not account for the reluctance to refer to international politics as a harmonious realm, while competitive economies are often so described. Instead, one may say that the standards of performance now applied to international political systems are higher, or at least widely different. As John Maynard Keynes once remarked, those who believe that unhampered processes of natural selection lead to progress do not "count the cost of the struggle" (1926, p. 37). In international politics, we often count nothing but the costs of the struggle.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Theory of International Politics

Source: Theory of International Politics (1979), p. 137

Death , Nature

“That political correctness should have become acceptable in Britain is a glaring symptom of the country's decline.”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

The Truth that Dare not Speak its Name. p. 104.
The Light's On At Signpost (2002)

Country

“Politics and strategy are one. Nations should live in an atmosphere of self-criticism because it is healthy, but always with one heart and one mind. Stoop to the unhappy, and lift them up in your arms! Thaw out frozen America with the fire of your hearts! Make the natural blood of the nations´ course vigorously through their veins! The new American are on their feet, saluting each other from nation to nation, the eyes of the laborers shining with joy. The natural statesman arises, schooled in the direct study of Nature. He reads to apply his knowledge, not to imitate.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Our America (1881)

School , Nature , Knowledge , Study

“A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 243 (8 December 1711).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

Men , Stupidity

“We are at an extraordinary moment in human history: never before has the possibility of true democracy been so close to realisation. At the cost of publishing and duplication has dropped to near zero, a truly free press, and a truly informed public, becomes a reality. A new Information Enlightment is dawning where knowledge flows freely, beyond national boundaries. Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography, replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency. In this new Enlightenment it isn't just scientific truths that are the goal, but discovering truths about the way we live, about politics and power.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page ix.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

Truth , Way , Democracy , History

“Just about everybody in politics has something to hide. The higher they rise in the system, the more skeletons they have stuffed in their closets. And as we have all come to appreciate, this goes double — or perhaps even squared — for politicos who got their start in Chicago. And because the system no longer cares about our rights (to the extent it ever did) we can no longer focus solely on issues related to them, but must cast about more widely to ensnare and defeat the enemies of liberty.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"It Has to Cost Them Something".

“Every right of suffrage, like any political right in general, is not to be measured by some sort of abstract scheme of “justice,” or in terms of any other bourgeois-democratic phrases, but by the social and economic relationships for which it is designed. The right of suffrage worked out by the Soviet government is calculated for the transition period from the bourgeois-capitalist to the socialist form of society, that is, it is calculated for the period of the proletarian dictatorship. But, according to the interpretation of this dictatorship which Lenin and Trotsky represent, the right to vote is granted only to those who live by their own labor and is denied to everyone else.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: The Russian Revolution (1918), Chapter Five, "The Question of Suffrage"

Justice

“The societies to which most readers of this book belong represent a narrow slice of human cultural diversity. Societies from that slice achieved world dominance not because of a general superiority, but for specific reasons: their technological, political, and military advantages derived from their early origins of agriculture, due in turn to their productive local wild domesticable plant and animal species. Despite those particular advantages, modern industrial societies didn’t also develop superior approaches to raising children, treating the elderly, settling disputes, avoiding non-communicable diseases, and other societal problems. Thousands of traditional societies developed a wide array of different approaches to those problems.”

Jared Diamond book The World Until Yesterday

Epilogue
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012)

Children , Books , World , Disease

“Our place is there where pointed out by politics, that means by the side of Germany and Italy. We determined our place in the time already when Germany had not been yet one of the most powerful world superpowers and when Italy had just eneterd the path of invicible fascism.”

János Esterházy (1901–1957) Czechoslovak member of Czechoslovak national parliament, russian nation politician and hungary nation polit…

About orientation of his foreign policy for Hungarian prime minister.
International relationships
Source: [Deák, Ladislav, Ladislav Deák, Political profile of János Esterházy, Bratislava, Kubko Goral, 1995, 20, 80-967427-0-1]

World , Time

“Country comes before politics.”

Jerry Springer (1944) American television presenter, former lawyer, politician, news presenter, actor, and musician

Springer On The Radio for Air America Radio, July 15th, 2005

Country

“Islam is politics or it is nothing.”

Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989) Religious leader, politician

Islamic Revolution, Bernard Lewis, The New York Review of Books, April 28, 1988, 2011-12-26 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1988/jan/21/islamic-revolution/?pagination=false,
Attributed

“The group process contains the secret of collective life, it is the key to democracy, it is the master lesson for every individual to learn, it is our chief hope or the political, the social, the international life of the future.”

Mary Parker Follett The New State

Source: The New State, 1918, p. 23

Life , Secret , Hope , Democracy

“As a moral issue, abortion will be debated as long as humankind is able to debate. I respect all points of view as being valid to the holder. What concerns me is abortion as a legal and political issue. I am against all reproductive laws for the same reason I am against the draft. I believe that legal ownership of one’s body is the most basic civil and human right. Without it, we are all slaves to whatever government is in power at any given time.”

Helen Reddy (1941) Australian actress

On abortion, pg. 184.
The Woman I Am: A Memoir (2006)

Law , Time

“The craziest of all political systems, the unique leader state, has found its deserved end. History will note for eternity that the German people were not able on their own initiative to shake off the yoke of the National Socialists. The victory of the Americans, English, and Russians was a necessary occurrence to destroy the National Socialists' delusions and plans for world domination.”

Friedrich Kellner (1885–1970) German Justice inspector

May 1, 1945; Vol. 2, p. 930.
Diary (1939 - 1945)

People , World , History , Victory

“Robert Hughes (Labour MP for Aberdeen North): With regard to the Prime Minister's desire for a classless society and social mobility, will he explain why there are no women in his Cabinet, or is the only woman in his Cabinet the back-seat driver?
John Major: In recent years, in all aspects of life in this country, women have been taking a higher profile: in the law, in commerce, in the civil service, in industry and in politics - and that will continue. As those women would wish it to be, they will reach the top on merit - oh yes, and if the hon. Gentleman is patient, he will find women aplenty in top positions in my Government. Indeed, if he had waited awhile, perhaps even to the end of today, he would not have asked that question.”

John Major (1943) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Hansard, 6ser, vol 181 col 1015 (29 November 1990) http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199091/cmhansrd/1990-11-29/Orals-2.html
The phrase 'Oh yes' was a remark said several times at the first Prime Minister's Question Time in which Major answered questions.
1990s, 1990

Life , Women , Law , Question

“Nobody else was such a household name in Jewish political life at home and abroad in Europe as little old me.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Argentina Audiotapes (1957)

Life , Home

“For example, Monstuart Elphinstone, a Governor of Bombay, suggested in his Minute dated 14 May 1859: “Divide et Impera was the old Roman motto, and it should be our”. Given the circumstances, it would have been foolish of any imperialist power not to follow such a policy. But for achieving this aim there was no need for them to distort Indian history. British historians had just to reiterate what the Muslim chroniclers themselves had written about the “glorious achievements” of their kings and conquerors. Their stories needed no proof: they stood confirmed by the hundreds of vandalised medieval monuments. The mistake lay with the misjudgement of our Congress-culture Government and the so-called secularist and Stalinist historians. They chose to treat history as a handmaid of politics to please the Muslim minority. They instructed their text-book writers to eschew mention of unpalatable historical facts like destruction of temples and forced conversions by Muslims in history, language and social science. But perpetration of lies has proved counter-productive. It has encouraged Muslims to ask for proof as to when Babur or Aurangzeb broke this or that temple, knowing full well that such shrines were actually vandalised and razed.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 8

Books , History , Science

“The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

1910s, Address to Congress on War (1917)

World , Peace , Democracy

“As a keen political observer, I've noticed that most people do not really vote for someone for the Presidency as much as they vote against the other candidate. And I think President Johnston's [sic] decision was unfair to these people.”

Pat Paulsen (1927–1997) United States Marine

Referring to President Johnson's decision not to run for re-election
Unidentified press conference, 1968
Featured in Pat Paulsen for President (1968), part 2 of 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbP0ufyax5A&feature=relmfu, 01:30 ff (10:30 ff in full program)

People , Thinking , Decision

“I may be a sleeping politician. But one should know that a sleeping politician is always awake about national politics. I am not like politicians who sleep on national issues though they may be awake physically”

H. D. Deve Gowda (1933) Indian politician

Source: Gowda upset over seeing his sleeping photo http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bangalore/Gowda-upset-over-seeing-his-sleeping-photo/articleshow/97258.cms, The Times of India, 27 July 2003

Sleep

“Politeness and civility are the best capital ever invested in business.”

P.T. Barnum (1810–1891) American showman and businessman

Ch. 17: "Be polite and kind to your customers" http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/barnum/moneygetting/moneygetting_chap18.html
Art of Money Getting (1880)

Business

“[Abraham Lincoln believed that] [t]he only reason people do not succeed in a capitalist environment is because they are improvident, they are lazy, they are good for nothing, or they experience some incredible turn of bad luck—that’s why "better luck next time." That may seem like vanishingly small consolation to people who’ve just come through a depression, but for Lincoln, that kind of hardship paled beside slavery. Slavery says that there is a category of people that can never be allowed to rise, that cannot improve themselves no matter how hard they try because they will always be slaves. It’s very much the classic disjuncture between the Enlightenment and feudalism. Feudalism talks about people being born with status, and everyone comes into this world equipped with a status. This status is either free or slave, serf or nobility, elect or damned, whatever. For the Enlightenment people come into this world armed with rights, and the ideal political system is the system that allows them to realize those rights, to use those rights in the freest and most natural fashion possible.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

Bad luck , People , World , Fashion

“This army has built up a system of political work which essential for the people's war and is aimed at promoting unity in its own ranks, unity with the friendly armies and unity with the people and at disintegrating the enemy forces and ensuring victory in battle.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Coalition Government (1945)

War , People , Victory

“At this time our nation is in a bad state in regards education and wealth, but God has given us the light of religion and the Quran is present for our guidance, which has ordained them and us to be friends. Now God has made them rulers over us. Therefore we should cultivate friendship with them, and should adopt that method by which their rule may remain permanent and firm in India, and may not pass into the hands of the Bengalis… If we join the political movement of the Bengalis our nation will reap a loss, for we do not want to become subjects of the Hindus instead of the subjects of the "people of the Book…”

Syed Ahmed Khan (1820–1898) Indian educator and politician

KUMAR, S (2000). Educational Philosophy in Modern India. Anmol Publications Pvt. Ltd. p. 60.

God , Friendship , People , Books

“I disagree with him on some of the issues. But when he came out and said he’s willing to audit the Federal Reserve, I said, "He’s worth supporting," especially since he’s not afraid to be politically incorrect. That’s a huge breath of fresh air, I wish he would renounce his support for the NSA.”

Ben Garrison American political cartoonist

Lakeside Cartoonist a Player on the Political World Stage http://www.dailyinterlake.com/archive/article-c3636174-3b30-11e6-8943-1f17ebd0c321.html (June 25, 2016)

Support

“In 1918 Hitler was in a military hospital blinded from a British poison gas attack. He was just a corporal, he had no family, a limited education, no friends, no connections, no political status, nothing. He decides that he will lead Germany in redressing the grievous wrongs that had been done to it after the First World War and straightening out some of the mistakes that were being made in German society. And fifteen years later he is Chancellor of Germany and he did what he said he was going to do. A wounded war veteran with nobody to help him, and he pulled it up just through his own willpower. That is an amazing story.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

The Fame of a Dead Man's deeds, 2001
2000s, 2001
Source: [Griffin, 2001, 68]

War , World , Education , Family

“The hard part is discriminating between factual reporting and journalistic fiction. Last year at the National Press Club I said out loud and in public [C-SPAN was there] that the difference between me and a lot of reporters is that I do good fiction. Some were polite enough to chuckle.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

"Clancy Speaks Again, Briefly" (12 February 2000) http://www.clancyfaq.com/Clancy%20Speaks%20Again%20Briefly.htm
2000s

Parting

“He was often, and much beyond reason, provoked by my failures in cases where success could not have been expected; but in the main his method was right, and it succeeded. I do not believe that any scientific teaching ever was more thorough, or better fitted for training the faculties, than the mode in which logic and political economy were taught to me by my father. Striving, even in an exaggerated degree, to call forth the activity of my faculties, by making me find out everything for myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt the full force of the difficulties; and not only gave me an accurate knowledge of these two great subjects, as far as they were then understood, but made me a thinker on both.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/28/mode/1up pp. 28–29

Training , Failure , Success , Knowledge

“That is why a thinker like Thoreau said that ‘that government is the best which governs the least.’ This means that when people come into possession of political power, the interference with the freedom of people is reduced to a minimum. In other words, a nation that runs its affairs smoothly and effectively without much State interference is truly democratic. Where such a condition is absent, the form of government is democratic in name.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Harijan, (Nov. 1. 1936). M.K. Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol-62, New Delhi: Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India (1975) p. 92
1920s, An Autobiography (1927)

People , Freedom

“We have to give the American people a referendum. We will win this referendum if we have it now. If we wait and delay five or six years we will lose this referendum. The public is way ahead of the political class. They get that things are broken. They get that we're spending their kids' inheritance and mortgaging their future. They are ready to be talked to like adults and not like children. So when they see the demagoguery that is directed toward people or ideas that are sincere and are real, it doesn't work anymore. The Democrats are going to come at us with their old playbook. They're going to tap into the emotions of fear, anger, and envy. But that's not aspirational. That's not hope and change, and I don't think it's going to work anymore.”

Paul Ryan (1970) American politician

Source: Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (2010), p. 15

Children , People , Fear , Hope

“It is an irony of the country’s political situation that while untouchability in the social field is considered to be evil, it is sometimes extolled as a virtue in the political field. If a party does not wish to practise untouchability towards its rivals in the political establishment, it is supposed to be doing something wrong. We, in the Jana Sangh, certainly do not agree with the communists’ strategy, tactics and their political culture. But that does not justify an attitude of untouchability towards them. If they are willing to work with us on the basis of issues, or as part of a government committed to an agreed programme, I see nothing wrong in it…. These (SVD) governments are a step towards ending political untouchability. The spirit of accommodation shown by all parties, despite their sharp differences, is a good omen for democracy.”

Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916–1968) RSS thinker and co-founder of the political party Bharatiya Jana Sangh

Deendayalji’s speech at the Calicut session of the Jana Sangh, 1967., quoted in L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008)

Democracy , Evil , Parting , Country

“The United States has been very clear that we did have to have some political basis to make clear that that cessation of hostilities was not going to countenance a return to the status quo ante. This resolution does that. And now we're going to see who is for peace and who isn't.”

Condoleezza Rice (1954) American Republican politician; U.S. Secretary of State; political scientist

Press Briefing http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/70015.htm, August 6, 2006.

Hostility , Peace

“I'd do some things differently if I were writing this book from scratch today. I would be more nuanced in the history sections. I'd be less inclined to see everyone at "Self-development Stages Six and Seven" as the cat's meow. Above all, perhaps, I would emphasize that some of what I call "monolithic institutions" are evolving (i. e., are being shoved by us) in a positive direction today – so I'd bend over backward to encourage immersion as well as resistance. We need transformers everywhere, inside "The System" as well as outside it. But even with such "flaws" (mainly the flaws of youth), I think New Age Politics is still the best single expression of the new politics as a coherent, systemic, integral whole.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Page 17.
New Age Politics: Our Only Real Alternative (2015)

Books , Youth , Age , History

“Fascism rebelled against modernity inasmuch as modernity was identified with the rationalism, optimism, and humanism of the eighteenth century, but it was not a reactionary or an anti-revolutionary movement in the Maurrassian sense of the term. Fascism presented itself as a revolution of another kind, a revolution that sought to destroy the existing political order and to uproot its theoretical and moral foundations but that at the same time wished to preserve all the achievements of modern technology.”

Zeev Sternhell (1935) Israeli historian

Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, p. 7

Optimism , Sense , Time

“Who among American heroes could meet their tests, who would be cleared by their committees? Not Washington, who was a rebel. Not Jefferson, who wrote that all men are created equal and whose motto was "rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Not Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution; or Wendell Phillips, who spoke for the underprivileged everywhere and counted himself a philosophical anarchist; not Seward of the Higher Law or Sumner of racial equality. Not Lincoln, who admonished us to have malice toward none, charity for all; or Wilson, who warned that our flag was "a flag of liberty of opinion as well as of political liberty"; or Justice Holmes, who said that our Constitution is an experiment and that while that experiment is being made "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death."”

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) American historian

Who is Loyal to America? (1947)

Death , Men , God , Justice

“All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies. All Praise is due to Allah. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

2000s, 2004, 2004 Video Broadcast on Al-Jazeera October 29

Suffering , Loss , Clothes

“The world was arrogant and self-satisfied, but behind all this confidence there was an uneasy sense of impending disaster. The old creeds, both religious and political, were largely in the process of dissolution, but we did not realise the fact, and therefore did not look for new foundations.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

"A University's Bequest to Youth" Speech in Toronto (10 October 1936)
Canadian Occasions (1940)

World , Confidence , Sense

“To the extent that a political party bent upon socialization is supported by a substantial majority of voters, it will be able to utilize the powers of government in diminishing the power of ownership.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Property (1935)

Support

“Canada may be fast-forwarding, jump starting, into a new pattern, a model of communication linkages, a civilization that is more than a grab for power and dominance, a place that could channel the fires of the global wirings, where political alliances are subject to electrical ebb and flow, and the alchemical cultivations of imagination and perception, of the self, could precail of the ideology of capital.”

B. W. Powe (1955) Canadian writer

First Meditation, p. 65-66
Towards a Canada of Light (2006)

Imagination , Communication

“Political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means of meeting poverty and illiteracy and disease. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961, UN speech

Disease , Hope , Future

“There is but one way to Americanize for each and every American to understand the ideals of America and to be able to interpret them in every act of his daily life. But this alone is not enough. Groups of men, from the humblest unit to the greatest political entity in the country, must be able to do this in combination; and there must be agreement. There are certain things that men go all over the world to find. Where those things exist men stay; when they fail men leave. These things are basic. They are opportunities to better conditions, to be equal to other men, to have the right to be heard, freedom of thought, worship, and speech, and to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is for this that men desert their home countries, and it is for this that they may desert America if their native lands in Europe offer the same great adventure and reward.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life , Men , World , Way

“For those unfamiliar with modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly on institutional power in India's academic and educational sector by Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P. N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When, during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them from key political positions but, in a typical instance of politicians' short-sightedness, they left the Marxists? hold on the cultural sector intact. In the good old Soviet tradition, they at once set out to falsify history and propagate their own version through the official textbooks. After coming to power in 1998, the BJP-dominated government has made a half-hearted and not always very competent attempt to effect glasnost (openness, transparency) at least in the history textbooks. This led the Marxists to start a furious hate campaign against the so-called 'saffronization' of history.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Ayodhya, the Finale (2003)

Hate , Education , Confidence , History

“It's important that the drivers stay together, because in difficult moments we have each other. If we are not together the financial and political interests of the organisers and constructors come to the fore.”

Ayrton Senna (1960–1994) Brazilian racing driver

Interview with TV3 Catalunya, 1987 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SKJcl2N7bE

“Ultimately there are but three systems of ethics, three conceptions of the ideal character and the moral life. One is that of Buddha and Jesus, which stresses the feminine virtues, considers all men to be equally precious, resists evil only by returning good, identifies virtue with love, and inclines in politics to unlimited democracy. Another is the ethic of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, which stresses the masculine virtues, accepts the inequality of men, relishes the risks of combat and conquest and rule, identifies virtue with power, and exalts an hereditary aristocracy. A third, the ethic of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, denies the universal applicability of either the feminine or the masculine virtues; considers that only the informed and mature mind can judge, according to diverse circumstance, when love should rule, and when power; identifies virtue, therefore, with intelligence; and advocates a varying mixture of aristocracy and democracy in government. It is the distinction of Spinoza that his ethic unconsciously reconciles these apparently hostile philosophies, weaves them into a harmonious unity, and gives us in consequence a system of morals which is the supreme achievement of modern thought.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961)
A - F

Love , Life , Men , Hostility

“In the new environment and markets it is not enough to only promote the export of Finland. We need the political view where the countries are developing and political abilities to contribute the direction of development, e. g. in the human rights and security issues.”

Pekka Haavisto (1958) Finnish politician

Source: Pekka Haavisto: Moninapaista arvokeskustelua http://www.ulkopolitiikka.fi/article/910/pekka_haavisto_moninapaista_arvokeskustelua/ Ulkopolitiikka 4/2011” ”Uusissa toimintaympäristöissä ja uusilla markkinoilla ei riitä, että edistetään Suomen vientiä. Pitää olla myös poliittinen näkemys siitä, mihin maat ja alueet ovat kehittymässä, sekä poliittisia valmiuksia vaikuttaa kehityksen suuntaan, esimerkiksi ihmisoikeus- ja turvallisuuskysymyksiin.”

Country

“Were Kim Jong Il to abandon his ideology of paranoid, race-based nationalism and normalize relations with Washington, his personality cult would lose all justification, while his impoverished country would lose all reason to exist as a separate Korean state. The problem for U. S. negotiators is therefore not one of sticks versus carrots; the regime in Pyongyang will neither be bullied nor sweet-talked into committing political suicide.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, North Korea's Race Problem (February 2010)

Problem , Suicide , Personality , Country

“This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions, and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted beneath the many social and political changes of the last two thousand years”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 31: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

People , Sense , Nostalgia , Change

“With people, Moore suspected, no matter how noble the intent, a defect was unavoidable, a taint of politics.”

George Alec Effinger (1947–2002) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Death in Florence (1978), Chapter 3 “Moore and More” (p. 123).

People

“We believe that the most pressing political necessity is the consolidation of a United Front joining together all sections of the revolutionary, radical and democratic movements. Only a united front—led in the first place by the national liberation movements and the working people—can decisively counter, theoretically, ideologically and practically, the increasingly fascistic and genocidal posture of the present ruling clique”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

People , Decision

“When we say architecture, we include the social, political and économie context. Architecture of any sort is in fact the inévitable background, support and frame of any work.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

Daniel Buren (1979), cited in: A. A. Bronson, ‎Peggy Gale, ‎Art Metropole (1983). Museums by artists. p. 73
1970s

Support

“Historically, "public administration" has grown in large part out of the wider field of inquiry, "political science." The history of American political science during the past fifty years is a story much too lengthy to be told here, but some important general characteristics and tendencies it has communicated to or shared with public administration must be noted.
The Secular Spirit Despite: the fact that "political science" in such forms as moral philosophy and political economy had been taught in America long before the Civil War, the present curriculum, practically in its entirety, is the product of the secular, practical, empirical, and "scientific" tendencies of the past sixty or seventy years. American students dismayed at the inadequacies of the ethical approach in the Gilded Age, stimulated by their pilgrimage to German universities, and led by such figures as J. W. Burgess, E. J. James, A. B. Hart, A. L. Lowell, and F. J. Goodnow have sought to recreate political science as a true science. To this end they set about observing and analyzing "actual government." At various times and according to circumstances, they have turned to public law, foreign institutions, rural, municipal, state, and federal institutions, political parties, public opinion and pressures, and to the administrative process, in the search for the "stuff" of government. They have borrowed both ideas and examples from the natural sciences and the other social disciplines. Frequently they have been inspired by a belief that a Science of Politics will emerge when enough facts of the proper kinds are accumulated and put in the proper juxtaposition, a Science that will enable man to "predict and control" his political life. So far did they advance from the old belief that the problem of good government is the problem of moral men that they arrived at the opposite position: that morality is irrelevant, that proper institutions and expert personnel are determining.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Source: The Administrative State, 1948, p. 22-23

Life , Men , War , Age

“Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature… no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

First Frame of Government (25 April 1682).
Frame of Government (1682)

Men , Law , Nature , Freedom

“Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.”

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright

Letter declining the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith

Art

“Let me assure my countrymen of the Southern States that it is my earnest desire to regard and promote their truest interest — the interests of the white and of the colored people both and equally — and to put forth my best efforts in behalf of a civil policy which will forever wipe out in our political affairs the color line and the distinction between North and South, to the end that we may have not merely a united North or a united South, but a united country.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

Inaugural Address (5 March 1877)

People , Color , Effort , Country

“‘By the second half of the nineteenth century, the importance of light and space as both metaphors or, and habitations for, the human self, or “the substance called the mind”, is absolute, especially with Tagore, who, in a letter in 1894 to his niece, would demand, not political freedom … but “more light, more space”.’”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Clearing a Space (2008)

Freedom , Light

“Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Die Nationalökonomie entstand als eine natürliche Folge der Ausdehnung des Handels, und mit ihr trat an die Stelle des einfachen, unwissenschaftlichen Schachers ein ausgebildetes System des erlaubten Betrugs, eine komplette Bereicherungswissenschaft.
Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844)

Fraud , Nature , Appearance , Science

“I said, who the hell wants to speak about politics when I'm in front of the boy scouts, right?”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2017, July, 2017 National Scout Jamboree (July 24, 2017)

Boy , Hell , Scouting

“No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

On Tony Blair, 1995
1990s

Hope

“For his Spiritual Church Joachim of Fiore foresaw the continuance of the Papacy (much modified), but the bishops were to disappear. If I think at all of the Church to come, then I hope and pray above all for a revival, indeed resurrection of the episcopal office. To my mind it is still a prisoner of its almost thousand-year long disastrous fusion with temporal power. Strange - only a few years ago I thought the Emperor Otto I just marvellous and was full of admiration for his genius in raising the bishops to Reichsfürsten - princes of the realm - thus securing an unshakeable foundation for his Empire. Politically it was a brilliant decision… Yet I can imagine no way in which a mortal enemy of the Church in all craft and cunning could have fastened a worse fate upon her… For how often was their charismatic office as pastors overshadowed, indeed frequently rendered impossible, by their temporal mission and worldly achievements..”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

Fate , Hope , Way , Imagination

“The conviction that freedom is a universal desire is not the property of any political camp. … Yet those who hold it remain a precious few, outnumbered many times over by the skeptics who don't.”

Natan Sharansky book The Case for Democracy

Pages 18-19.
The Case for Democracy (2004, with Ron Dermer)

Freedom , Universe , Time

“A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both.”

Fawn M. Brodie (1915–1981) American historian and biographer

Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, ch. 1 (1974)

Friendship , Passion

“If you want to understand the beliefs that are shaping global politics, read the Book of Revelation.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Review: Sacred Causes http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/oct/28/politics by Michael Burleigh (2006-10-28)

Books , Understanding , Reading

“New plains frontier was politically organized and opened and settled with little, if any, heed to its natural features of climate and land cover.”

John M. Gaus (1894–1969) American political scientist

John Merriman Gaus, cited in: Renée Beville Flower, ‎Brent M. Haddad (2014), Reawakening the Public Research University. p. 197

Nature

“I do not believe that our friends at the South have any just idea of the state of feeling, hurrying at this moment to a pitch of intense exasperation, between those who respect their political obligations, and those who apparently have no impelling power but that which a fanatical position on the subject of domestic Slavery imparts. Without discussing the question of right — of abstract power to secede — I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood; and if, through the madness of Northern Abolitionists, that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason's and Dixon's line merely. It [will] be within our own borders, in our own streets, between the two classes of citizens to whom I have referred.”

Franklin Pierce (1804–1869) American politician, 14th President of the United States (in office from 1853 to 1857)

Letter to Jefferson Davis (6 January 1860).

Feeling , Idea , Question , Fight

“Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Wo Politik ist oder Oekonomie, da ist keine Moral.
“Selected Ideas (1799-1800)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (1968) #101

“Tides are like politics. They come and go with a great deal of fuss and noise, but inevitably they leave the beach just as they found it. On those few occasions when major change does occur, it is rarely good news.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Deepsix (2001), Chapter 22 (p. 323)

Change

“Capitalism is a system in which many scarce resources are owned privately, and decisions about allocating them are a private prerogative. Democracy is a system through which people as citizens may express preferences about allocating resources that they do not privately own. Hence the perennial question of political theory and of practical politics concerns the competence of these two systems with regard to each other. Is it possible for governments to control a capitalist economy? In particular, is it possible to steer the economy against the interests and preferences of those who control productive wealth?”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

Adam Przeworski and Michael Wallerstein, The American Political Science Review (Mar., 1988)

People , Democracy , Question , Decision

“We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of himself and his environment. Primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane. There was almost always somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time that man has been on earth, there has been something like a frontier…
Gradually, however, man has been accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical earth and a closed sphere of human activity. A few unusual spirits among the ancient Greeks perceived that the earth was a sphere. It was only with the circumnavigations and the geographical explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, that the fact that the earth was a sphere became at all widely known and accepted. Even in the thirteenth century, the commonest map was Mercator's projection, which visualizes the earth as an illimitable cylinder, essentially a plane wrapped around the globe, and it was not until the Second World War and the development of the air age that the global nature of tile planet really entered the popular imagination. Even now we are very far from having made the moral, political, and psychological adjustments which are implied in this transition from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966, p. 3

Men , War , Age , World

“The economic life of the human race had for some time been based on coal, but latterly oil had been found a far more convenient source of power; and as the oil store of the planet was much smaller than its coal store, and the expenditure of oil had of course been wholly uncontrolled and wasteful, a shortage was already being felt. Thus the national ownership of the remaining oil fields had become a main factor in politics and a fertile source of wars.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 4, “The Russo-German War” (pp. 29-30)

Life , War , Time

“But the violence which we chose to adopt was not terrorism. We who formed Umkhonto were all members of the African National Congress, and had behind us the ANC tradition of non-violence and negotiation as a means of solving political disputes. We believe that South Africa belongs to all the people who live in it, and not to one group, be it black or white. We did not want an interracial war, and tried to avoid it to the last minute. If the Court is in doubt about this, it will be seen that the whole history of our organization bears out what I have said, and what I will subsequently say, when I describe the tactics which Umkhonto decided to adopt.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1960s, I am Prepared to Die (1964)

War , People , History

“Several commentators have reflected on the fact that this may be one of the great political victories of all time. In terms of votes that may be true, but in terms of what a victory really is, a huge landslide margin means nothing at all unless it is a victory for America. It will be a victory for America only if, in these next four years, we, all of us, can work together to achieve our common great goals of peace at home and peace for all nations in the world, and for that new progress and prosperity which all Americans deserve.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1970s, Remarks on Being Reelected (1972)

World , Peace , Home , Time

“The comments on value-free psychology are so vague as to have no teeth. I wish Sternberg had delivered on whatever point he was trying to make by pointing to some actual examples of how my values (or their lack) have led me to ‘comparisons that should not be made’ or inferences predicated on untrue assumptions. The ‘value-free’ psychology I would advocate is not free of scientific values, or humanistic moral values, or the value of social responsibility, but I do decry the infestation of psychology, or any science, by political and social ideologies. Ideological contamination of psychological research can only make suspect the claim of psychology to scientific status.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), p. 448

Science

“The development of American political theories has received surprisingly little attention from students of American history. Even the political ideas of the Revolutionary fathers and the tenets of such important schools as those represented by Jefferson and Adams have not been carefully analyzed or put in their proper perspective. The political theory of the controversies over slavery and the nature of the Union has generally been presented from the partisan point of view, while recent tendencies in political thought have received no adequate notice.”

Charles Edward Merriam (1874–1953) American political scientist

Source: A History of American Political Theories, 1903, p. vii; Preface, lead paragraph

School , History , Idea , Nature

“Market exchange requires a combination of both state and customary institutions. For any developed system of commodity exchange there must be a legal system inscribing and protecting rights to individual or corporate property. There must be a body of contract law with criteria for distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary transfers of goods and services, and courts to adjudicate in such matters. However, the evolution of law is not simply a matter of legislative construction; a great deal of law grows out of custom and precedent. Property and contract law are not exceptions. Consequently, the existence of property and exchange is tied up with a number of legal and other institutions, e. g. government, political system, and common societal values.”

Geoffrey Hodgson (1946) British economist

Source: Economics and Institutions, 1988, p. 150

Law

“I've been working hard at assuming Court polish, but the more I learn about what really goes on behind the pretty voices and waving fans and graceful bows, the more I comprehend that what is really said matters little, so long as the manner in which it is said pleases. I understand it, but I don't like it. Were I truly influential, then I would halt this foolishness that decrees that in Court one cannot be sick; that to admit you are sick is really to admit to political or social or romantic defeat; that to admit to any emotions usually means one really feels the opposite. It is a terrible kind of falsehood that people can only claim feelings as a kind of social weapon.”

Sherwood Smith book Crown Duel

Crown Duel (Crown & Court #1 - 2, 1997)

People , Feeling , Understanding , Learning

“Liberalism in its political instantiation, for all of its appeal, is so powerful a theory that it probably works better in opposition than in government. Modern liberalism has become what liberal philosophers not long ago would have derided as a “comprehensive view” -- a theory that believes itself able to give an account of how every institution of the society should operate, and even, alas, how people should think. Add to that a dash of triumphalism, and you wind up with a government impatient with the tendency of human beings to resist having too much forced on them at once.”

Stephen L. Carter (1954) American legal academic and writer

Trump and the Fall of Liberalism (November 11, 2016)

People , Thinking

“When Reagan and Thatcher came to power, “authoritarian populism” was a term academics used to describe their politics. Now it’s a phenomenon, growing rapidly, cutting across old definitions of left and right, goes the argument. But it’s not so simple and the phenomenon is not new. The term “authoritarian populist” is a construct that, if we are not careful, could blind us to the real roots of centrism’s sudden crisis – and to the answers.”

Paul Mason (journalist) (1960) British journalist

How do we fight the loudmouth politics of authoritarian populism? (21 November 2016)

“Liberalism means an intelligent effort to keep the political and economic development of our nation abreast of the responsibilities that come from an atomic age. It means an extension of the use of our resources for the common good, the solving of the problem of maintaining democratic principles and free competitive enterprise in a day of Big Business, Big Unions, and Big Government.”

Estes Kefauver (1903–1963) American politician

New Republic (June 22, 1946)

Age , Intelligence , Business , Problem

“Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois, and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government.”

Friedrich Engels book Principles of Communism

Principles of Communism (1847)

“Democracy is essentially a political system that recognizes the equality of humans before the law.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Address to Constituent Assembly, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/education/bsa/citizenship_merit_badge/eisenhower_citizenship_quotations.pdf (8 August 1946)
1940s

Law , Democracy

“Politics is a game of compromise.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–2018) 10th Prime Minister of India

Quote of the week, 5 December 2013, India Today http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/politics-is-game-of-compromise-says-a-b-vajpayee/1/263190.html,

Game

“In terms of political geography, The French Revolution ended the European Middle Ages.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Source: The Age of Revolution (1962), Chapter 4, War

Age

“The relative stability of the system is… largely determined by its capacity to adjust to the demands of the actors affected by changing political and environmental conditions.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

p, 125
War and Change in World Politics (1981)

Change

“Every place radically imbues (formally, architecturally, sociologically, politically) with its meaning the object (work creation) shown there. Art in general refuses to be implied a priori and so pretends to ignore or reject the draconian role imposed by the museum (the gallery), a role both cultural and architectural. To reveal this limit (this role), the object presented and its place of display must dialectically imply one another”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

Daniel Buren (1975), in: Studio International. Vol. 189-190, (1975), p. 124
1970s

Art

“Political affiliation is not a relevant part of this decision; privacy and personal freedom should be fundamental right for everyone.”

John Twelve Hawks American writer

How We Live Now (2005)

Decision , Freedom , Parting , Personality

“When words are both descriptive and prescriptive, thyey become political words used in struggles for power.”

Joseph Nye (1937) American political scientist

Source: Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (6th ed., 2006), Chapter 6, Intervention, Institutions, and Regional and Ethnic Conflicts, p. 187.

“Among the political attitudes that prevail in Germany today, only socialism has the potentiality of inner value and integrity.”

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) German historian and philosopher

Prussianism and Socialism (1919)

“The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Quoted by: Philip Jenkins, God's Continent / Christianity, Islam And Europe's Religious Crisis https://books.google.nl/books?id=IilDVBzWiGAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22God%27s+Continent+/+Christianity,+Islam+And+Europe%27s+Religious+Crisis%22&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiTy-arla3MAhVCQBoKHWTlAToQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=%22And%20for%20my%20part%20I%20cannot%20but%20believe%22&f=false, 2007, p.3
Source: The Great Heresies (1938), Chapter III

Wisdom , Future , Parting

“To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, though merely such, is a great trust.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Volume iii, p. 497
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Law

“I personally would say that the quickest way to wipe out a group of people is to put them on a soul food diet. One of the tragedies is that the very folks in the black community who are most sophisticated in terms of the political realities in this country are nonetheless advocates of “soul food.” They will lay down a heavy rap on genocide in America with regard to black folks, then walk into a soul food restaurant and help the genocide along.”

Dick Gregory (1932–2017) American comedian, social activist, social critic, writer, and entrepreneur

Source: Dick Gregory's Natural Diet For Folks Who Eat (1973), p. 81

People , Food , Way , Soul

Quotes about politics page 48

Quotes about politics
page 48