Political Action Quotes

The essential thing is the formation of the political will of the nation: that is the starting point for political action. ~ Adolf Hitler

Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity. ~ Tom Robbins

Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)," but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival. ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

Affirmative action works but we're going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place. ~ Harold Washington

I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

If you take Darwinian theory, make a 'scientific' principle out of it, put it into political action, then you have something like Nazi Germany. ~ Bruce Lipton

Radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing. In short, radicals must have a degree of control over the flow of events. ~ Saul Alinsky

Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millenia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to 'hasten the inevitable,' not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. ~ Daniel Dennett

No two individuals, it would seem, could be further apart politically than [Eldridge] Cleaver and [George] Wallace. Cleaver, on the one hand, embodies and articulates the rage that has gripped large segments of the black community in recent years. Born of desperation and despair, this rage has produced burnings and lootings in the ghetto as well as a philosophy of black separatism that represents more a withdrawal from an intimidating and unresponsive white society than a positive program for political action. This rage was also the source of Cleaver's influence. He could ride its powerful currents to fame and notoriety--which the mass media were more than willing to heap upon him--but he could not begin to propose a solution to the injustices that had produced it. Indeed, to assuage the anger and frustration in the black community would have threatened his own base of power.

Wallace, on the other hand, has often been called the embodiment of white racism and reaction. That he is, but, more precisely, his preeminence was a result of the fear which gripped large sections of the white community throughout the country. The Wallace movement grew to frightening proportions not because of anything that Wallace did but because the politically polarized atmosphere in the country called forth the need for a man who would represent the fears and the very worst instincts of millions of people.

While Cleaver and Wallace seem on the surface to be so very different, ~ Bayard Rustin

... Weber insists that one should not give up or lose faith in the face of this struggle. Indeed, he calls for us to engage in, rather than withdraw from, the problems of this world. He reminds us, for example, that while 'successful political action is always the "art of the possible" ... the possible is often reached only by striving to attain the impossible that lies beyond it'. ~ Nicholas Gane

I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they're participating in some meaningful political action. ~ Howard Rheingold

If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse. ~ Leo Strauss

There is a weapon we can fight with. That is the weapon of political action. ~ Harry Bridges

If there is a silver lining in the action of MSNBC against Keith Olbermann, it is that people will now pay more attention to the political role of corporate media in America. ~ Bernie Sanders

Any political action
with breach of constitution
is called open-ended corruption. ~ Tushar Shinde

Military operations alone cannot defeat an insurgency because only economic development and political action can address most sources of disaffection. If military operations are not conducted consistent with political objectives or occur without economic development, they are certain to alienate the population further, reduce the amount of intelligence available to [...] security forces, and strengthen rather than weaken the enemy. ~ H.R. McMaster

Political action is the highest responsibility of a citizen. ~ John F. Kennedy

I think the process of being hopeful, being really opportunity oriented, not just in rhetoric but in action, showing that no one get's left behind, not just by talking about it but by doing it, I think is really a key [to political success]. ~ John Kasich

interests of mankind as a whole, but they do not suffice to determine political action. Perhaps they will do so at ~ Anonymous

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook. ~ Joseph Conrad

...it is essential that we make an important distinction between issues of politics and problems in psychology. We should see this as a distinction between what we do in order to influence the political and economic relations in the society and what, in a more personal way, we do to achieve self-knowledge and identity. Now I do not think that these are hard and fast categories that totally exclude one another. A just society certainly encourages a healthy psychology, and individuals can find personal fulfillment through political involvement. But I think we must make this distinction, because in periods of great social upheaval--and we are living through such a period--there is a tendency to politicize all things, including scholarship, art, friendship, and love. The most extreme form of this total politicization is totalitarianism, a stage we have not yet reached. But even a moderate form of it can be dangerous since it can lead to a politics so preoccupied with psychological issues that the goals of political action are obscured and even rendered unobtainable. ~ Bayard Rustin

I'll tell you what I really think about politicians. The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flame thrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire from them how they would assess the action from a political point of view. ~ Harold Pinter

If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible. ~ David Harvey

If the church preaches faith in anything other than the resurrection - if it gives so much as the impression that anything else, be it political action, moral achievement, or spiritual proficiency, can save the world - it becomes just one more false, parochial prophet leading the world away from the catholic parousia of Christ in the universal death of history. ~ Robert Farrar Capon

I think, you know, architecture should not just be something that follows up on events but be a leader of events ... by implementing an architectural action, you actually are making a transformation in the social fabric and in the political fabric. Architecture becomes an instigator. ~ Lebbeus Woods

We must let the world know children's stories and we must take effective protective, legal and political actions to ensure that as many children as possible are spared the brutalities of war. Our joint action has, and will, make a difference, if only we make the effort. ~ Radhika Coomaraswamy

My films can be considered political action against the tyranny of good taste. ~ John Waters

One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us without some degree of mystical seeing and action. ~ Richard Rohr

In addition to depoliticization as a mode of dispossessing the constitutive histories and powers organizing contemporary problems and contemporary political subjects - that is, depoliticization of sources of political problems - there is a second and related meaning of depoliticization with which this book is concerned: namely, that which substitutes emotional and personal vocabularies for political ones in formulating solutions to political problems. When the ideal or practice of tolerance is substituted for justice or equality, when sensitivity to or even respect for the other is substituted for justice for the other, when historically induced suffering is reduced to "difference" or to a medium of "offense," when suffering as such is reduced to a problem of personal feeling, then the field of political battle and political transformation is replaced with an agenda of behavioral, attitudinal, and emotional practices. While such practices often have their value, substituting a tolerant attitude or ethos for political redress of inequality or violent exclusions not only reifies politically produced differences but reduces political action and justice projects to sensitivity training, or what Richard Rorty has called an "improvement in manners." A justice project is replaced with a therapeutic or behavioral one. ~ Wendy Brown

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression. ~ Marshall McLuhan

You don't want atheism shoved down your throat? OK. We will stock knocking on doors spreading our 'Truth,' and having tax-exempt organizations dedicated to atheism that have influential political action committees. We will also stop printing 'In atheism we trust' on all US currency and saying, 'One nation, under atheism" in the pledge of allegiance. We will also stop insisting that everyone who disagrees with us will be sentence to eternal damnation… Wait… ~ David G. McAfee

Connell doesn't read the campus papers much, but he has still managed to hear about the debating society inviting a neo-Nazi to give a speech. It's all over social media. There was even an article in The Irish Times. Connell hasn't commented on any of the Facebook threads, but has liked several comments calling for the invite to be rescinded, which is probably the most strident political action he has ever taken in his life. ~ Sally Rooney

Power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money. ~ Hannah Arendt

The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning. ~ Max Weber

The tragedy of all political action is that some problems have no solution; none of the alternatives are intellectually consistent or morally uncompromising; and whatever decision is taken will harm somebody. ~ James Joll

All of us can make changes, but the changes that are most needed are not light bulbs and windows but laws and policies and treaties. So, yes, we are in a phase of this (climate protection) struggle where civic and political action is at the top of the list. ~ Al Gore

Bond is the longest-running franchise ever and there's a reason for that: they are action movies but they are also touched by current events without being political or too serious. ~ Javier Bardem

Voting is the foundation stone for political action. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Autonomous state actions will regularly take forms that attempt to reinforce the authority, political longevity, and social control of the state. ~ Theda Skocpol

This weekend the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, featured several speakers including Sarah Palin and Phil Robertson from 'Duck Dynasty.' It was a good weekend for conservatives - and a great weekend for wild animals. ~ Jimmy Fallon

A plan without action isn't a plan, it's a speech. ~ T. Boone Pickens

The pursuit of truth, as a form of political action, is inherently disruptive, anti-authoritarian, and dangerous to those content with the way things are. ~ Nancy Snow

So is he a radical?" non-Muslims often asked when I told them about the Sheikh. "Not at all," I'd say, assuming we were all speaking in post-9/11 code. "Of course not."

And I'd meant it. He is not a radical. Or rather, not their kind of radical.

His radicalism is of entirely another caliber. He's an extremist quietist, calling on Muslims to turn away from politics and to leave behind the frameworks of thought popularised by Islamists in recent centuries. Akram's call for an apolitical Islam unpicked the conditioning of a generation of Muslims, raised on the works of Abu l'Ala Maududi and Sayyid Qutb and their nineteenth-century forerunners. These ideologues aimed to make Islam relevant to the sociopolitical struggles facings Muslims coping with modernity. Their works helped inspire revolutions, coups, and constitutions. But while these thinkers equated faith with political action, the Sheikh believed that politics was puny. He was powered by a certainty that we are just passing through this earth and that mundane quests for land or power miss Islam's point. Compared with the men fighting for worldly turf, Akram was far more uncompromising: turn away from quests for nation-states or parliamentary seats and toward God. "Allah doesn't want people to complain to other people," he said. "People must complain to Allah, not to anyone else."

All the time spent fulminating, organising, protesting? It could be saved for prayer. So unjust governments run ~ Carla Power

Boycott is a widely understood form of social, economic, and political action. ~ Steve Crawshaw

When the goal of political action is no longer the defense of liberty, no word other than demagoguery can describe the despicable nature of politics. ~ Ron Paul

If you throw one stone, it's a punishable offence. If 1,000 stones are thrown, it's political action. If you set a car on fire, it's a punishable offence. If hundreds of cars are set on fire, it's political action. Protest is when I say I don't agree with something. Resistance is when I ensure that things with which I disagree no longer take place. ~ Ulrike Meinhof

What I say is, that the real non-resistants can believe in direct action only, never in political action. For the basis of all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through. ~ Voltairine De Cleyre

possibilities of our nature. Instead of reflecting first, we sometimes rush into thoughtless action. Instead of making a reflective, seriously intended, self-committing choice, we sometimes prefer to follow the line of least resistance and to drift lazily along, long-term consequences be damned. The entire environmental movement is based on these propositions. If it is not constituted by study groups, inquiries, data collection, publications, warnings and alarms, consciousness raising, propaganda, education, and political action campaigns designed, at a minimum, to raise public awareness, what is the environmental movement? If it is not concerned ~ Ronald Bailey

The only reason the president insists on raising [tax] rates is because he knows it will destroy Republican unity, it will cause a complete fracture of the Republican majority in the house, it will hand him a Congress that he can then manipulate for the next two years at least because the Republicans will be neutered ... This is entirely a political action, a way to get a surrender from the Republicans. ~ Charles Krauthammer

What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash. ~ James Hansen

What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope? ~ John Dewey

I found, when circulating chapters from this book, that some readers feel I am too hard on heterosexuality. I do not mean to be coming out against it. I simply do not see why the nation has to have an official sexuality, especially one that authorizes the norm of a violent gentility; that narrows the field of legitimate political action; that supports the amputation of personal complexity into categories of simple identity; that uses cruel and mundane strategies both to promote shame for non-normative populations and to deny them state, federal, and juridical supports because they are deemed morally incompetent to their own citizenship. This is the heterosexuality I repudiate. ~ Lauren Berlant

Equal protection under the law is not a hard principle to convince Americans of. The difficulty comes in persuading them that it has been violated in particular cases, and of the need to redress the wrong. Prejudice and indifference run deep. Education, social reform, and political action can persuade some. But most people will not feel the sufferings of others unless they feel, even in an abstract way, that 'it could have been me or someone close to me'. Consider the astonishingly rapid transformation of American attitudes toward homosexuality and even gay marriage over the past decades. Gay activism brought these issues to public attention but attitudes were changed during tearful conversations over dinner tables across American when children came out to their parents (and, sometimes, parents came out to their children). Once parents began to accept their children, extended families did too, and today same-sex marriages are celebrated across the country with all the pomp and joy and absurd overspending of traditional American marriages. Race is a wholly different matter. Given the segregation in American society white families have little chance of seeing and therefore understanding the lives of black Americans. I am not black male motorist and never will be. All the more reason, then, that I need some way to identify with one if I am going to be affected by his experience. And citizenship is the only thing I know we share. The more differences between us are emphasized, th ~ Mark Lilla

The civil rights movement is evolving from a protest movement into a full-fledged social movement--an evolution calling its very name into question. It is now concerned not merely with removing the barriers to full opportunity but with achieving the fact of equality. From sit-ins and Freedom Rides we have gone into rent strikes, boycotts, community organization, and political action. As a consequence of this natural evolution, the Negro today finds himself stymied by obstacles of far greater magnitude than the legal barriers he was attacking before: automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation. These are problems which, while conditioned by Jim Crow, do not vanish upon its demise. They are more deeply rooted in our socioeconomic order; they are the result of the total society's failure to meet not only the Negro's needs but human needs generally. ~ Bayard Rustin

The first rule of good theatre is 'Show, don't tell.' It applies to good political action as well. ~ Carne Ross

There's good art and there's bad art. A lot of action films are bad art, but Paul Greengrass showed us with the Bourne films that it's possible to make an action film with a political, social conscience. ~ Joe Wright

I don't care much about the outcome. I'd like for people to feel better and have better lives, but I don't think that's in the cards through political action. I think bloodshed is still the way you get dramatic change. That'll never happen because they've got all the guns now. At least they've got the nice guns, the big ones, the ones with night vision. ~ George Carlin

Human paint, produce films and videos; they dance, dream and make music; they engage in political action, exchange goods, perform rituals, build houses start wars, act in plays, try to please patrons- and so on ... They contain patterns, press the practitioners to "conform" and in this way mold their thought, their perception, their actions, and their discriminative abilities. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Venezuelans have a long history. So we are able to listen to each other, to talk to each other. From here were born the liberators of the region, and they said before and after that process we have a culture of political action. We are not in despair. That's the image broadcast to abroad. ~ Nicolas Maduro

When we black people commit ourselves to living simply as a political action, as a way of breaking the stress caused by unrelenting hedonistic desire for material objects that are not needed for survival, or essential to well-being, we will not be talking about ebonics. We will be out in the streets demanding that the public schools have enough teachers so that all kids, cross color, can read and write in standard English and in Spanish too. ~ Bell Hooks

How do you react when your own government lies to you systematically about life-and-death questions? As I have noted earlier, the answer is political action in the state legislatures, and one weapon in the hands of the public is an understanding of the pseudo-science and pseudo-epidemiology represented by articles like this one. ~ Harris L Coulter

Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is. ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

The real focus needs to be on political action to stop this runaway train, real soon. ~ William H. Calvin

Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States. ~ William Blum

What is music in America? It's this stand-in for political action in a lot of senses. We have no democracy and we have no art culture, and we've long considered politics nebbish-y and hopelessly unsexy. So a lot of what would be considered political activism is channeled into cultural work. ~ Ian Svenonius

The starship thing is really political action and reaction, the natural outgrowth of Volunteers. ~ Paul Kantner

When, thirty-five years ago, I tried to give a summary of the ideas and principles of that social philosophy that was once known under the name of liberalism, I did not indulge in the vain hope that my account would prevent the impending catastrophes to which the policies adopted by the European nations were manifestly leading. All I wanted to achieve was to offer to the small minority of thoughtful people an opportunity to learn something about the aims of classical liberalism and its achievements and thus to pave the way for a resurrection of the spirit of freedom after the coming debacle. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes. ~ Michael Joseph Oakeshott

One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding. ~ Paulo Freire

We make our lives pleasurable, and therefore bearable, by picturing them as they might be; it is less obvious, though, what these compelling fantasy lives - lives of, as it were, a more complete satisfaction - are a self-cure for. Our solutions tell us what our problems are; our fantasy lives are not - or not necessarily - alternatives to, or refuges from, those real lives but an essential part of them. As some critics of psychoanalysis rightly point out, a lot depends on whether our daydreams - our personal preoccupations - turn into political action (and, indeed, on whether our preferred worlds are shared worlds, and on what kind of sharing goes on in them). There is nothing more obscure than the relationship between the lived and the unloved life. (Each member of a couple, for example, is always having a relationship, wittingly or unwittingly, with their partner's unloved lives; their initial and initiating relationship is between what they assume are their potential selves.) So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening. ~ Adam Phillips

The Millennials, as a result, are less likely to be divided or even torn asunder by the culture wars of the boomer generation. They will live naturally with diversity. They will accept a more activist government. They will be more attuned to environmental needs. All this points in the direction of the mindful economy, if the healing strengths of the Millennial generation's tolerance and optimism are mobilized for collective political action. What, ~ Jeffrey D. Sachs

Only armchair politicians are immune from committing mistakes. Errors are inherent in political action. ~ Nelson Mandela

I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur. ~ Donna Tartt

Advent means "coming." Note that it is an action in progress, an act not yet accomplished, one we look forward to with renewed hope. Therefore, it is a time of expectation and preparation. It is a time of waiting and watching, of preparing our hearts and minds for the coming of Jesus Christ. ~ Nan Lewis Doerr

I definitely acknowledge that 'The Matrix' and Trinity had an influence on female action-oriented characters in television and in film. I think it's awesome. ~ Carrie-Anne Moss

For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights. ~ B.R. Ambedkar

The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: "He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture. ~ Derrick Jensen

Americans are sick and tired of political gamesmanship. ~ Henry Waxman

The city, which should be the symbol and center of civilization, can also be made to function as a concentration camp. This is one of the significant discoveries of contemporary political science. ~ Edward Abbey

nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination. There are trees, dreams, sunrises; there are thunderstorms, shadows, rivers; there are wars, flea bites, love affairs; there are the lives of people, Gods, entire galaxies. The simplest human action varies from one person and occasion to the next-how else would we recognize our friends only from their gait, posture, voice, and divine their changing moods? Only a tiny fraction of this abundance affects our minds. This is a blessing, not a drawback. A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed. ~ Paul Feyerabend

If we can use technology to shorten the path between intention and action, that excites me. ~ Gerry Lopez

An epic without a focus - without a single action, a coherent plot, a single terrible point to make - was just a very long poem. ~ Daniel Mendelsohn

I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back. "I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense," C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. "It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs." We ~ Joan Didion

I am determined to elect a president of our choosing this year and one who will be deeply indebted, and who will recognize his indebtedness. Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this, I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life ... If we select Nixon, then he, I know for sure knows the facts of life. ~ Howard Hughes

But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. ~ Neil Postman

Perhaps the most obvious political inequality is the violation of the precept one person one vote. Yet until recent times most writers rejected equal universal suffrage. Indeed, persons were not regarded as the proper subjects of representation at all. Often it was interests that were to be represented, with Whig and Tory differing as to whether the interest of the rising middle class should be given a place alongside the landed and ecclesiastical interests. For others it is regions that are to be represented, or forms of culture, as when one speaks of the representation of the agricultural and urban elements of society. At the first sight, these kinds of representation appear unjust. How far they depart from the precept one person one vote is a measure of their abstract injustice, and indicates the strength of the countervailing reasons that must be forthcoming.119 ~ John Rawls

am in revolt against the recent fashion of attaching so much weight to political ideology. For the last fifty years, we have paid too much attention to political differences, just as we used to pay too much attention to religious differences. ~ Helen MacInnes

Every action either teaches you or blesses you. ~ Debasish Mridha

The Negro problem, like all other political problems, is fundamentally a moral issue. This is realism, not idealism. Those of my colleagues who believe that they are particularly 'hard boiled' because they overlook the fact that human beings are struggling for their consciences are simply unrealistic. ~ Gunnar Myrdal

Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods. ~ Ron Chernow

The person that made me want to make movies, and the reason I do films, is Bruce Lee. He was an incredible actor, and he had a lot of charisma. Handsome, action, you know, everything was there. I loved Bruce Lee. ~ LL Cool J

Now I proudly call myself a feminist. If Tip O'Neill were alive today, I might even tell him that I'm a pom-pom girl for feminism. I hope more women, and men, will join me in accepting this distinguished label. Currently, only 24 percent of women in the United States say that they consider themselves feminists. Yet when offered a more specific definition of feminism - "A feminist is someone who believes in social, political, and economic equality of the sexes" - the percentage of women who agree rises to 65 percent.16 That's a big move in the right direction. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

The history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

President Ronald Reagan, who spent World War II in Hollywood, vividly described his own role in liberating Nazi concentration camp victims. Living in the film world, he apparently confused a movie he had seen with a reality he had not. On many occasions in his Presidential campaigns, Mr. Reagan told an epic story of World War II courage and sacrifice, an inspiration for all of us. Only it never happened; it was the plot of the movie A Wing and a Prayer - that made quite an impression on me, too, when I saw it at age 9. Many other instances of this sort can be found in Reagan's public statements. It is not hard to imagine serious public dangers emerging out of instances in which political, military, scientific or religious leaders are unable to distinguish fact from vivid fiction. ~ Carl Sagan

There's nothing so improves the mood of the Party as the imminent execution of a senior colleague. ~ Alan Clark

I prefer trying over talking. ~ Dillon Burroughs

Like two lost souls, we fall asleep in each other's arms, hoping to find ourselves once again. ~ Jalpa Williby

Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity. ~ George Will