Quotes about politics
page 8
Source: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Source: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
“There was a door, but it was terribly bashful, so Auri politely pretended not to see it.”
Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things
"Einstein's Reply to Criticisms" (1949), The World As I See It (1949)
Context: A man's value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in this matter. It looks at first sight as if our estimate of a man depended entirely on his social qualities.
And yet such an attitude would be wrong. It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine — each was discovered by one man.
Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.
Source: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology
Source: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946), p. 124; Essay "Politics as a vocation"
Context: The problem — the experience of the irrationality of the world — has been the driving force of all religious evolution. The Indian doctrine of karma, Persian dualism, the doctrine of original sin, predestination and the deus absconditus, all these have grown out of this experience. Also the early Christians knew full well the world is governed by demons and that he who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers and for his action it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.
“He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”
Source: 1900s, Major Barbara (1905)
“For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”
Source: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship
“All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”
In Defense of Women (1918)
1910s
Variant: The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Source: In Defense Of Women
Context: Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
Source: The Devil's Dictionary and Other Works
Source: Assata: An Autobiography
“To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.”
Source: Prime of Life
Source: Talking About a Revolution: Interviews with Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, bell hooks, Peter Kwong, Winona LaDuke, Manning Marable, Urvashi Vaid, and Howard Zinn
"A Cult of Ignorance", Newsweek (21 January 1980) http://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf
General sources
Context: There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Source: Attorney Robbie Flak speaking of the (fictional) Governor of Texas, The Confession, Ch. 12 (2010)
“Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.”
Source: Why Marx Was Right
“I like politics and history and am happiest when having a good argument about ideas.”
Source: We Should All Be Feminists
“Are you out of your mind?"
It's not polite to lie to your best friend. "It's a possibility.”
Source: Magic Bleeds
“When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.”
Variant: When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea (2008)
Source: Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea
Unspecified edition, p. 225.
Source: On Beauty (2005)
“The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.”
“One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.”
Quoted in the Manchester Guardian (31 December 1977), and Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations (1988) https://web.archive.org/web/20000709051930/http://www.bartleby.com/63/90/4790.html edited by James B. Simpson; Says Who?: A Guide To The Quotations Of The Century (1988) by Jonathon Green, p. 17 http://books.google.com/books?id=xUwOAQAAMAAJ&q=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CK0BEOgBMBk and The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989), p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=bs0J36MpieIC&pg=PA45&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=%22When%20childhood%20dies%2C%20its%20corpses%20are%20called%20adults%22&f=false
“Yanking his inner manwhore back to the land of polite conversating, he forced his hands to stop”
Source: Lover Unleashed
“In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.”
Source: The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
Source: Atlas of the Human Heart
Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Letter to James Madison (30 January 1787); referring to Shays' Rebellion Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 6:65
1780s
Source: The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film
“I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.”
Source: My Life on the Road
Jean Louise (Scout) Finch
Pt. 2, ch. 16
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
“It was not polite for a Temujai general to allow his emotions to show.”
Source: The Battle for Skandia
Source: A People's History of the United States
Source: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
“Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.”
“His cold politeness, his ceremonious grace, were worse than anything.”
Source: Persuasion
Source: Bridget Jones's Diary
Source: The Queen of the Damned
Source: Still Life with Woodpecker
“Don't you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover.”
Source: Life of Pi (2001), Chapter 99, p. 330
Context: Don't you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?
“Any serious social, political, and economic change must include veganism.”
Source: Magic Bleeds
From an interview for Italian television (RAI) (10 March 1986) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106223
Second term as Prime Minister
Context: In my work, you get used to criticisms. Of course you do, because there are a lot of people trying to get you down, but I always cheer up immensely if one is particularly wounding because I think well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left. That is why my father always taught me: never worry about anyone who attacks you personally; it means their arguments carry no weight and they know it.
Source: The Lives of Christopher Chant
“I’m being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite.”
Usher II (1950)
Source: The Martian Chronicles (1950)
“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.”
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947
Richard Dawkins on militant atheism http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html, (February 2002)
Context: We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligencia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligencia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it: the intelligencia, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.
Response to FDA complaint (1954)
Context: Inquiry in the realm of Basic Natural Law is outside the judicial domain of this or ANY OTHER KIND OF SOCIAL ADMINISTRATION ANYWHERE ON THIS GLOBE, IN ANY LAND, NATION, OR REGION.
Man's right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be more than an empty political slogan.
"The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" http://www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/addams6.htm; this piece by Jane Addams was first published in 1892 and later appeared as chapter six of Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)
Context: These young people accomplish little toward the solution of this social problem, and bear the brunt of being cultivated into unnourished, oversensitive lives. They have been shut off from the common labor by which they live which is a great source of moral and physical health. They feel a fatal want of harmony between their theory and their lives, a lack of coördination between thought and action. I think it is hard for us to realize how seriously many of them are taking to the notion of human brotherhood, how eagerly they long to give tangible expression to the democratic ideal. These young men and women, longing to socialize their democracy, are animated by certain hopes which may be thus loosely formulated; that if in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the notion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through common intercourse; that the blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
American Photo (January/February 2000), p. 90
Context: Since the commercialization and banality of editorial magazine pages have made this work uninteresting, advertising has become an increasingly important part of my work. It is interesting to compare European and American mores in regard to my work. One will notice that most of my European images have a stronger sexual content that those destined for American publication. The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.
Misattributed
“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.”
Source: From Dictatorship to Democracy
“The brutal reality of politics would be probably intolerable without drugs.”
Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century