Petroleum Politics Quotes

Dad's oil dehydrator was a contained electrostatic field, one electrode down the center, the other the container's inner wall. Principal problem was finding a dielectric to separate the two. Refuse oil poured in came out as oil of the highest grade, dry chemicals, and drinking water. Petroleum Rectifying Company successfully prohibited its use. ~ John Cage

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

Tax reform means, 'Don't tax you, don't tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.' ~ Russell B. Long

After eighteen long months covering this dreary business, the whole campaign appears in my mind's eye as one long, protracted scratch-fight over Internet-fueled nonsense. ~ Matt Taibbi

Behind tranquillity lies conquered unhappiness. ~ J. William T. Youngs

It is not so much that women have a different point of view in politics as that they give a different emphasis. And this is vastly important, for politics is so largely a matter of emphasis. ~ Crystal Eastman

Politics is not bean bags. It's serious, tough stuff. ~ Colin Powell

A new report shows that medicare and Medicaid made more than $50 Billion in bad payments during fiscal year 2011. Under Obamacare, that'll become known as 'Tuesday.' ~ Fred Thompson

there is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered. ~ Hannah Arendt

People ask, 'Is the science going to run ahead of the ethics?' I don't think that's always the problem. I think it's that the science runs ahead of the politics. Bioethics can alert people to something coming down the road, but it doesn't mean policy and politicians are going to pay attention. They tend to respond when there's an immediate crisis. The job of the ethicist, in some ways, is to warn or be prophetic. You can yell loudly, but you can't necessarily get everybody to leave the cinema, so to speak. ~ Arthur Caplan

I came from a disadvantaged home. They were Republicans. ~ Paul Tsongas

If someone was to introduce hope and idealism into our political system, I think the tension that would create in other areas would certainly be ripe. You would think that if you bring oxygen to the organism, the organism lives. But there may be other organisms in there that thrive in darkness and in a more anaerobic environment. Watching those creatures writhe will always be interesting. ~ Jon Stewart

Someone's looking for a lead, in his duty to a king or creed. Protecting what he feels is right, fights against wrong with his life. ~ Robert Palmer

So, ignorant we are. But we're not stupid. Indeed ... remaining ignorant about politics and our government is a perfectly rational response to the government we have. The question isn't what we know. The question is what we're capable of knowing, and doing, if we have the right incentives, and the right opportunity. ~ Lawrence Lessig

The anti-tax-cut, soft-on-defense, big-spending Democrats will take the Democratic Party to the edge and maybe over. ~ Joe Lieberman

Politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe. ~ Thomas Sowell

All White House hopefuls we forewarn:
You'll have to prove that you were born.
Before Trump hits the state of granite,
He must identify the planet
Where he first took on human form -
A place where blowhards are the norm. ~ Calvin Trillin

It may be true that, if I could con-
vince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in
fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to
admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics
is very similar to magic - one reason both politics and magic tend, just
about everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud. ~ David Graeber

For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers. ~ William James

In politics it commonly takes a superior woman to overcome the handicap of traditional prejudice. ~ Bertha Knight Landes

What we need, we are told every day, is more and better leadership. But what this demand involves is a closer and closer approximation to fascism. The fascists alone have evolved an efficient form of leadership: efficient leadership is fascism. ~ Herbert Read

Surely the greatest tragedy for men in regard to the feminine principle is that their fear alienates them from their own anima, the principle of relatedness, feeling and connection to the life force. This alienation from self obliges alienation from other men as well. Often their only connection with each other comes through superficial talk about outer events, such as sports and politics. ~ James Hollis

It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination
and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit. ~ Kate Millett

1983:
To my generation has now come the challenge. In the days to come we will be tested on whether we have the moral courage, the realism, the idealism, the tenacity, and the ability to sacrifice some of the current comfort to invest in the future ... I believe that this generation will rise to the challenge ... The experts believe that, like the Democratic Party itself, the less than forty-year-old voters are prepared to sell their souls for some security, real or illusory. They have misjudged us. Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts. ~ Joe Biden

Religion is unusual among divisive labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might have to respect them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic. ~ Richard Dawkins

For man to go from less than 1% haves to 40%, living at high standard - despite decreasing resources - cannot be explained by anything other than by doing more than less. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. ~ Frederic Bastiat

Imperialism is da woist thing I ever hoid! ~ Karl Marx

ON THE MODUS OPERANDI OF OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP

"According to a new ABC/Washington Post poll, President Trump's disapproval rating has hit a new high."
The President's response to this news was ""I don't do it for the polls. Honestly - people won't necessarily agree with this - I do nothing for the polls," the president told reporters on Wednesday. "I do it to do what's right. I'm here for an extended period of time. I'm here for a period that's a very important period of time. And we are straightening out this country." - Both Quotes Taken From Aol News - August 31, 2018

In The United States, as in other Republics, the two main categories of Presidential motivation for their assigned tasks are #1: Self Interest in seeking to attain and to hold on to political power for their own sakes, regarding the welfare of This Republic to be of secondary importance. #2: Seeking to attain and to hold on to the power of that same office for the selfless sake of this Republic's welfare, irregardless of their personal interest, and in the best of cases going against their personal interests to do what is best for this Republic even if it means making profound and extreme personal sacrifices. Abraham Lincoln understood this last mentioned motivation and gave his life for it.

The primary information any political scientist needs to ascertain regarding the diagnosis of a particular President's modus operandi is to first take an insig ~ John Lars Zwerenz

Philosophy has become the shadow of itself over the years. Nine parts history and one part reflection on history. It has been ages since anything original came forth in the field. All the good thinking has already been done. Nowadays, philosophers are mostly institutionalized academics - like me - focused more on the politics of tenure than on philosophizing. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

We do not have to dig deep into history to understand the reality. The examples of Saddam Hussain, who was executed after a sham trial and the case of Muammar Gaddafi, who killed after surrendering in broad daylight, have given enough factual reality to understand the painful truth. ~ Nilantha Ilangamuwa

The larger the unit of capital present, the easier the transaction called emission of credit. Centralized lending of this kind (which is today universal) actively promotes the absorption of the small man by the great, the reduction of small property owners to a proletarian condition. ~ Hilaire Belloc

The history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral, social and political philosophy, is there to prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched. The intellectual historian can help us to appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds. This awareness can help to liberate us from the grip of any one hegemonal account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood. Equipped with a broader sense of possibility, we can stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of enquiry what we should think of them. ~ Quentin Skinner

The Unheavenly Chorus is the definitive study of participatory inequality in America. Marshaling prodigious evidence, the authors show how money not only buys influence directly but also affects associations that are supposed to be democratic antidotes to concentrated wealth. A monumental achievement of careful scholarship, this book offers real knowledge of how politics actually operates. ~ Robert Kuttner

We were idealists. We thought that when we got the vote the whole pattern of politics would be greatly improved and would be dominated by women. ~ Jessie Daniel Ames

I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before. ~ Frank Luntz

With subjectivity in philosophy, anarchism in politics goes hand in hand. Already during Luther's lifetime, unwelcome and unacknowledged disciples had developed the doctrine of Anabaptism, which for a time dominated the city of Munster. The Anabaptists repudiated all law since they held that good men will be guided at every moment by the Holy Spirit, who can not be bound by formulas. From this premise they arrive at communism and sexual promiscuity; they were therefore exterminated after a heroic resistance. ~ Bertrand Russell

I can sum up the corporate government disability system with two words: Toxic Bureaucrats. ~ Steven Magee

The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics
or more precisely, Revolution
co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church. ~ Octavio Paz

Never make a defense or apology before you are accused. ~ Charles I Of England

Direct democracy is lazy anarchy, for people who don't want to be governed but are too lazy to govern themselves. They want participation served to them. ~ Heather Marsh

Hussein praised his sons for putting up a brave fight, noting that U.S. forces had surrounded their compound with advanced weaponry, ground troops and warplanes. In case that didn't work, U.S. forces were prepared to tell Janet Reno that a small Cuban boy was inside the house. ~ Ann Coulter

Ah, it is hard to find this track of divine in the midst of this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness, with its architecture, its politics, its men! ~ Hermann Hesse

I could never go into politics, because I'm far too impatient and I'd want to be a dictator, albeit a benevolent one ... I would hope. ~ Joanna Lumley

Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion, and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways - in science, in politics, in every bold intention. ~ Shirley Temple

In careless ignorance they think it civilization, when in reality it is a portion of their slavery ... To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false pretenses, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. ~ Tacitus

There is no gambling like politics. Nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident. ~ Benjamin Disraeli