Personality Politics Quotes

All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. ~ Vladimir Lenin

But, in the Trump aftermath, I've measured the costs

And benefits of loving those who don't love
Strangers. After all, I'm often the odd one -

The strangest stranger - in any field or room.
"He was weird" will be carved into my tomb. ~ Sherman Alexie

I discourage a cult of personality. ~ Newt Gingrich

A man made for public life and authority never takes account of personalities; he only takes account of things, of their weight and their conseqences. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

The formation of Stalin's character is particularly important because the nature of his rule was so personal. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are no songs comparable to the songs of Zion, no orations equal to those of the prophets, and no politics like those which the Scriptures teach. ~ John Milton

When everyone's building a fence, isn't it a true fool who lives out in the open? ~ Zadie Smith

In politics I am growing indifferent - I would like it, if I could now return to my planting and books at home ~ Ulysses S. Grant

The richest persons in Africa are heads of state, governors and ministers. So every 'educated' African who wants to be rich - and there is nothing wrong with wanting to be rich - heads straight into government or politics. ~ George Ayittey

The Republican Party is slightly ahead of Democrats when it come to devaluing any traditional understanding of foreign and national security policy. This is not surprising, because in all other matter of public policy, the GOP has strictly subordinated practical governance and problem solving to the emotional thematics of an endless political campaign. Whether the topic is Iran, Russia, or the proper level of defense spending at a time of high deficits, the GOP's stance has little to do with the merits of the situation; it is a projection of domestic political sloganeering. Taking a position on anything, whcther it be Ukraine or the efficacy of drones, boils down to a talking-point projection of focus groups-tested emotional themes: strength versus weakness, standing tall versus cutting and running, acting versus thinking." pp. 157-158 ~ Mike Lofgren

One of the things that's great about New York is that it is not a one-industry town. It has education, academia, the service industry, arts, publishing, theater, politics, fashion, finance, as well as movie-making. ~ Sarah Jessica Parker

What was achieved under Nazi-fascism through bloody terror against the organized workers' movement and the people is to be achieved again today in West Europe through the information society ~ Red Army Faction

If those to whom power is delegated do well, they will be respected; if not, they will be despised. ~ Thomas Paine

Our problem is to become acquainted with our own selves, letting our personalities loose upon the world for the sheer adventure of their full development and in the positive hope that they may in their own way lift the level of humanity. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

I grew up in such a featureless, personality-less suburb. There was nothing to push against. ~ Patton Oswalt

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society - the farmers, mechanics, and laborers - who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. ~ Andrew Jackson

I could pose in fashion commercials as a high society star but politics is a new way of life. ~ Marat Safin

Sometimes in the middle of a presidential campaign, there's a political movie, and people are sick of hearing about politics, and they don't want to see that movie. They'd rather see "Godzilla." ~ Casey Affleck

Human beings resemble peregrine falcons: they had the power and the ability to soar up to the skies, free and ethereal and unrestrained, but sometimes they would also, either under duress or of their own free will, accept captivity...She had also observed how a hood would be put on these noble raptors to make sure they would not panic. Seeing was knowing, and knowing was frightening...But underneath that hood where there were no directions, and the sky and the land melted into a swathe of black linen, though comforted, the falcon would still feel nervous, as if in preparation for a blow that could come at any moment. Years later now, it seemed to her that religion – and power and money and ideology and politics – acted like a hood too. All these superstitions and predictions and beliefs deprived human beings of sight, keeping them under control, but deep within weakening their self-esteem to such a point that they now feared anything, everything. ~ Elif Shafak

Changing one's personality is as simple as stopping the earth's rotation; changing another's is even harder. ~ Maximus Freeman

We're more concerned about climate or economic equality or racial justice or anything else that is good for people and the planet, we simply must also spend some time wresting back our money-marinated democracy. This will require getting money out of politics and then getting people back in. ~ Annie Leonard

Jill: 'I don't pay attention to politics.'
Ben: 'You should. It's barely less important than your own heart beat.'
Jill: 'I don't pay attention to that, either. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests. ~ Patrick Henry

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Our politics are overrun with characters acting at the behest of shadows. ~ Charles M. Blow

[Harper] once told a friend, "I think about strategy twenty-four hours a day," and it was only a small exaggeration. ~ Lawrence Martin

But we forget that government was also created to act and make decisions. ~ Francis Fukuyama

Failure of government programs prompts more determined effort, while the loss of liberty is ignored or rationalized away ... whether is it is the war on poverty, drugs, terrorism ... or the current Hitler of the day, an appeal to patriotism is used to convince the people that a little sacrifice of liberty, here or there, is a small price to pay ... The results, though, are frightening and will soon become even more so. ~ Ron Paul

Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East. ~ Christopher Hitchens

No wonder Americans hate politics when, year in and year out, they hear politicians make promises that won't come true because they don't even mean them - campaign fantasies that win elections but don't get nations moving again ~ William J. Clinton

Not being bothered to exercise your right to vote is a privilege that many women still don't have. Dismissing politicians as all the same is a luxury. Our votes may not seem very important to us, but our lives without them would be immeasurably worse. For we needed universal suffrage to be firmly and unarguably in place before we could demand equal rights. And while it may be tempting for people to mutter that feminism is old-fashioned, boring and a fight already won, we have have to look at the statistics to see that what is true for women is a very long way short of being true for us all. ~ Natalie Haynes

I'm always amazed how many politicians have a very unlikely story, and when I talk to groups of students, I remind them that not everybody who gets into politics is a lawyer or went to school to study it. We all come to it for different reasons. ~ Chellie Pingree

At a conservative estimate, there are probably a million men and women in their twenties and thirties who would happily work long hours doing what most needs to be done, if they were paid something for it. ~ Philip Slater

Me and Kylie are sisters, but not everything we can always do together. She's not trying to be a model. She's trying to be more like a personality. We're trying to kind of separate ourselves - not in a bad way! ~ Kendall Jenner

One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations. ~ Herbert Marcuse

Politics now is rather like going into Starbucks for a coffee. ~ Rory Bremner

We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated. ~ Barack Obama

Boys are more likely to develop a masculine personality and acquire strong moral standards when they have a loving and nurturant rather than a threatening or fear-inspiring father. ~ James Q. Wilson

The media will spend weeks going through pay stubs for Bush's National Guard service in Alabama in the waning days of war, but if Kerry tells them exotic tales of covert missions into Cambodia directed by Richard Nixon, they don't even bother to fact-check who was president in December 1968. ~ Ann Coulter

I had worked in politics with Johnson and Nixon before becoming a historian and biographer. I kept discovering these dirtier, murkier threads in American politics that led back to Vegas' gambling interests and criminal connections. ~ Roger Morris

Zen says that if you drop knowledge - and within knowledge everything is included; your name, your identity, everything, because this has been given to you by others - if you drop all that has been given by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being: innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence. You will become a child again, reborn. ~ Rajneesh

Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer. ~ Henry Roth

I am always suspicious of the formulation that "politics" has prevented a great idea from being enacted by government. Politics IS government, in a democratic society. It's a challenge for school reformers, like reformers in any realm, to build a popular constituency for their work. If the people it's supposed to benefit vote against it, that tells me that the person pushing reform lacks political skill. And political skill is a good thing. ~ Nicholas Lemann

The social function of economic science consists precisely in developing sound
economic theories and in exploding the fallacies of vicious reasoning. In the pursuit of
this task the economist incurs the deadly enmity of all mountebanks and charlatans
whose shortcuts to an earthly paradise he debunks. The less these quacks are able to
advance plausible objections to an economist's argument, the more furiously do they
insult them. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

What we love is too much in the past, consists too much in the time that we have spent together for us to require the whole woman; we wish only to be sure that it is she, not to be mistaken as to her identity, a thing far more important than beauty to those who are in love; her cheeks may grow hollow, her body thin, even to those who were originally most proud, in the eyes of the world, of their domination over beauty, that little tip of a nose, that sign in which is summed up the permanent personality of a woman, that algebraical formula, that constant, is sufficient to prevent a man who is courted in the highest society and is in love with her from being free upon a single evening because he is spending his evenings in brushing and entangling, until it is time to go to bed, the hair of the woman whom he loves, or simply in staying by her side, so that he may be with her or she with him, or merely that she may not be with other people. ~ Marcel Proust

The ability of a country to wage war is not an accurate measure of its strengths, but of its fears. ~ Derek R. Audette

If you want to have any success in politics, sing softly and carry a big guitar, ~ Jimmie Davis

I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can't help it, it's what I've always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what's coveted, what's au courant? I think most people do this, they just don't admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch. ~ Gillian Flynn

Engagement is not a matter of either speaking or doing; not a matter of either offering a compelling intellectual vision or embodying a set of alternative practices; not a matter of either merely making manifest the richness and depth of interior life or merely working to change the institutions of society; not a matter of either only displaying alternative politics as gathered in Eucharistic celebrations or merely working for change as the dispersed people of God. It is all these things and more. The whole person in all aspects of her life is engaged in fostering human flourishing and serving the common good. ~ Miroslav Volf

If you can't see someone's got a game with great personality, you shouldn't be out there looking. ~ Jerry West

On what principle are we to awake the sleeper? In the name of what shall the flabby personality, magnetised by trifles, be inspired, be made discontented with its present way of life of railways, telegraphs, newspapers and cheap goods?
Individuals do not step out of the ranks because there is not the occasion. For whom, for what, or against whom are they to come forward? The absence of energetic men is not a cause but a consequence ~ Alexander Herzen

Thar is two things that every national crisis is bound to show up: first, a lot o' dum fools in command; second, lot o great commanders in the ranks. An' fortunately before the crisis is over the hull thing is sure set right, and the men is where they oughter be. ~ Ernest Thompson Seton

The first duty of the educator, whether he is involved with the newborn infant or the older child, is to recognize the human personality of the young being and respect it. ~ Maria Montessori