Politics includes all the activities and conflicts among people and parties to achieve power to implement policies. Politics is how people make decisions in public, together.
Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.
Conservatism stands on man’s confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious.
An airplane should never lean too much to the left or the right, because it puts every passenger into a panic and fear. Politics are much the same. Better to be balanced on both sides than to fly on a crazy angle.
One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.
Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
If the level and amount of consumption and waste of the western ‘rich’ countries ever reaches the poor countries, it will mean the end of humanity. The big world corporations are busy doing it…. The production, selling, consumption, accumulation, waste and advertisement explosions in the western ‘rich’ countries and the continued population explosion in the poor countries will turn into major catastrophes.
I am an artist and a political being as well.
So here comes this black guy from the Bay Area talking about peace, feminism, challenging racism, challenging the priorities of the country, and talking about preserving the fragile nature of our ecological system. People looked at me as if I was a freak.
We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe, and the threat is outrunning our response.
In the coming decades, questions of identity, meaning cultural heritage, language, and religion will play a central role in politics.
Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.
I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.
No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party who ignores her sex.
You who are journalists, writers, citizens, you have the right and duty to say to those you have elected that they must practice mindfulness, calm and deep listening, and loving speech. This is universal thing, taught by all religions.
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Politics is the way in which those without principles lead those without memory.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.
Capitalism and power politics have made our generation creatively sluggish, and our vital art is mired in a broad bourgeois philistinism.
The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master’s ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.
There are men running governments who shouldn’t be allowed to play with matches.
The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.
I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.
Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.
Politics is the best show in America. I love animals and I love politicians and I love to watch both of ’em play either back home in their native state or after they have been captured and sent to the zoo or to Washington.
Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.
A fool and his money are soon elected.
If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.
The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.
Politics is applesauce.
There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated.
What is morally wrong cannot be politically right.
America would be a better place if leaders would do more long-term thinking.
It is a fine game to play — the game of politics — and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.
