Political Arguments Quotes

...the postwar revolution in America's religious identity had its roots not in the foreign policy panic of the 1950s but rather in the domestic politics of the 1930s and early 1940s. Decades before Eisenhower's inaugural prayers, corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase "freedom under God." As the private correspondence and public claims of the men leading this charge make clear, this new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most - not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration in Washington. ~ Kevin M. Kruse

I think it's always dangerous to make political arguments in a religiously ideological way. And it's very dangerous to treat as traitors to the American nation those who think differently. ~ Adam Michnik

Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to try to put people in a corner. ~ Leon Panetta

When the political partisan's beliefs are insulted or ridiculed, he feels the 'offence' as deeply as any believer who has heard his god or prophet questioned. We do not, however, prohibit or restrict arguments about politics out of 'respect' for political ideologies, because we are a free society. We call societies that prohibit political arguments 'dictatorships', and know without needing to be told that the prohibiting is done to protect the ruling elite. ~ Nick Cohen

The political motive in the academic breast is honest enough. It is fear---genuine, perpetual, heart-felt timorousness. All the Political Arguments are addressed to this passion. Have you ever noticed how people say, 'I'm afraid I don't ...' when they mean, 'I think I don't ...'? ~ Francis Macdonald Cornford

Can people be persuaded?' is a very different question from 'Can arguments be won?' People change their minds about things all the time, but I'm not sure that anybody ever wins an argument. Persuasion is not a zero-sum game. It occurs when somebody moves, even slightly, away from one position and toward another. It is entirely possible for two (or more) people to move closer to each other's positions during an argument without either one being able to claim victory over the other.

But we like to win, and we hate to lose, so the fact that people don't usually win arguments doesn't stop most of us from trying. And we all think we know what winning means: It means crushing opponents and making them cry. It means humiliating them in front of a crowd. And it means displaying our power and our rightness for all the world to see and acknowledge. And this means that we often end up trying to win by employing rhetorical strategies that are fundamentally incapable of persuading anybody of anything. And that looks a lot like losing. ~ Michael Austin

In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself. Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was greeted by the sounds of bongos and acoustic guitars, protest singers, political arguments, activists leafleting, older chess players challenged by the young. This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem to be oppressive to anyone. ~ Patti Smith Just Kids

There are millions of Americans outside Washington who are tired of stale political arguments and are moving this country forward. They believe, and I believe, that here in America, our success should depend not on accident of birth, but the strength of our work ethic and the scope of our dreams. ~ Barack Obama

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. ~ Jonathan Haidt

Will it matter In 100 years who was right and who was wrong in our political arguments in our great nation? What will matter will be the legacy that our diligent footsteps leave for all who come behind us to comple the work in preserving America ... which will always better humanity in the process! ~ Timothy Pina

Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. ~ Albert Einstein

I believed then, and continue to believe now, that the benefits to our security and freedom of widely available cryptography far, far outweigh the inevitable damage that comes from its use by criminals and terrorists ... I believed, and continue to believe, that the arguments against widely available cryptography, while certainly advanced by people of good will, did not hold up against the cold light of reason and were inconsistent with the most basic American values. ~ Matt Blaze

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing. ~ Karl Rove

The baby Jesus was the last homeless person the Republicans liked. ~ Andy Borowitz

Have you ever found in history, one single example of a nation, thoroughly corrupted, that was afterwards restored to virtue? And without virtue there can be no political liberty. ~ John Adams

If this country is really to go forward along the path of social and economic justice, there must be a new party of nationwide and non-sectional principles, a party where the titular national chiefs and the real state leaders shall be in genuine accord, a party in whose counsels the people shall be supreme, a party that shall represent in the nation and the several states alike the same cause, the cause of human rights and of governmental efficiency. At present both the old parties are controlled by professional politicians in the interests of the privileged classes, and apparently each has set up as its ideal of business and political development a government by financial despotism tempered by make-believe political assassination. Democrat and Republican alike, they represent government of the needy many by professional politicians in the interests of the rich few. This is class government, and class government of a peculiarly unwholesome kind. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman

Obviously, the duty of artists is there, but it's more an indictment of the political system that someone like Zinn views artists as the seers, idealizing them as the people responsible for inspiring change. ~ Thom Yorke

I will die like a true-blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning - organize. ~ Joe Hill

All political power, all power as such, is stupid. Don't rush after it, don't be ambitious, because all ambition collects dust and only dust. If you are not disillusioned by dust, you will not be able to know what truth is. A man obsessed with ambition is not capable of knowing truth at all. Eyes full of ambition never see what is; they only see what they want to see. The ambitious mind is the wrong mind; the non-ambitious mind is the right mind. ~ Rajneesh

Let the government not be an instructor but a parent who loves and adjusts to the needs of the nation, But remember a parent does what makes things look good to the entire family without segregation. ~ Auliq Ice

The disgrace of one's people brings sorrow to the Nobel minded. ~ Chanakya

If today I have to make a political statement, it is, 'I love beauty.' I think beauty makes people better. ~ Marjane Satrapi

One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111] ~ Sigmund Freud

It is the Press which has corrupted our political morals - and it is to the Press we must look for the means of our political regeneration. ~ Alexander Hamilton

A lifetime spent in the study of the history of societies since the dawn of mankind presumably inclined him to skepticism and misgivings in regard to any great scheme, religious or political, that set out to create universal happiness in one fell swoop; what it was more likely to create, in his opinion, was universal misery; and his faith in heaven-sent saviors was hardly greater. ~ Francois Maspero

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

If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are disturbed as to how, by, and against whom wealth and political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wanting to act with others, to "do something," you have much in common with the writers of the three essays in Manifesto. ~ Adrienne Rich

Politicians will pander to special-interest groups eager to gain at the public expense. ~ Donald J. Boudreaux

The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture. ~ Glenn Greenwald

In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. ~ Eric Ambler

Most people find the word Apocalypse, to be a terrifying concept. Checked in the dictionary, it means only revelation, although it obviously has also come to mean end of the world. As to what the end of the world means, I would say that probably depends on what we mean by world. I don't think this means the planet, or even the life forms upon the planet. I think the world is purely a construction of ideas, and not just the physical structures, but the mental structures, the ideologies that we've erected, that is what I would call the world. Our political structures, philosophical structures, ideological frameworks, economies. These are actually imaginary things, and yet that is the framework that we have built our entire world upon. It strikes me that a strong enough wave of information could completely overturn and destroy all of that. A sudden realization that would change our entire perspective upon who we are and how we exist. ~ Alan Moore

We are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men. ~ Frederick Douglass

We're in a political depression - a great political depression ~ Chuck Todd

In former days, when there were Whigs instead of Liberals, it was almost a rule of political life that all leading Whigs sould be uncles, brothers-in-law, or cousins to each other. This was pleasant and gave great consistency to the party; but the system has now gone out of vogue. ~ Anthony Trollope

The language of these Soviet show trials ... could only be understood in the Aesopian imagery of the closed Bolshevik universe of conspiracies of evil against good in which 'terrorism' simply signified 'any doubt about the policies or character of Stalin.' All his political opponents were per se assassins. More than two 'terrorists' was a 'conspiracy' ... ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

The 2016 presidential election is ripe for the emergence of a game-changing political leader who either dramatically reforms one of the existing parties or mounts an independent bid. ~ Ron Fournier

Kindness' covers all of my political beliefs. ~ Roger Ebert

I've had enough
I'm sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me
Right?

I explain my mother to my father
my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother
my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks
the Black church folks to the ex-hippies
the ex-hippies to the Black separatists
the Black separatists to the artists
the artists to my friends' parents…

Then
I've got to explain myself
To everybody

I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it
I'm sick of it.

I'm sick of filling in your gaps

Sick of being your insurance against
the isolation of your self-imposed limitations

Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners

Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches

Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip

I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your humanness

I'm sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long

I'm sick of mediati ~ Kate Rushin

Music is more difficult - try naming a political band. The Dead Kennedys. The Dead Kennedys are political, but they are more funny than they are political. ~ Thom Yorke

For they are yet ear-kissing arguments. ~ William Shakespeare

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction ... One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgements of value follow directly from his wihes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. ~ Sigmund Freud

What I try to do is tell my constituents that this is what I believe and this is why I made that vote. And I think that that makes more sense to people generally than trying to triangulate some political position. ~ Martin Heinrich

Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind. ~ Hugo Black

What I always hate is when people call our movement a 'revolution'. For this to be a revolution, we would have to be opposing a standing government. Look around; there is no standing government. ~ Joe Reyes

The only motive that can keep politics pure is the motive of doing good for one's country and its people. ~ Henry Ford

But when it comes to democratic political parties, I prefer that monks and nuns not join them - in order to ensure proper democratic practice. ~ Dalai Lama

We know, for instance, that Americans have forcefully resisted extending the right to vote; those in power have disenfranchised blacks, women, and the poor in myriad ways. We know, too, that women historically have had fewer civil protections than corporations. Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft: high-sounding rhetoric, magnified, and political leaders dressing down at barbecues or heading out to hunt game. ~ Nancy Isenberg

Elected fifth president of the United States, Monroe transformed a fragile little nation - "a savage wilderness," as Edmund Burke put it - into "a glorious empire." Although George Washington had won the nation's independence, he bequeathed a relatively small country, rent by political factions, beset by foreign enemies, populated by a largely unskilled, unpropertied people, and ruled by oligarchs who controlled most of the nation's land and wealth. Washington's three successors - John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison - were mere caretaker presidents who left the nation bankrupt, its people deeply divided, its borders under attack, its capital city in ashes. ~ Harlow Giles Unger

I wasn't political enough to write articles about myself or go to cocktail parties, meaning that not only has my art been pirated and my intellectual property rights stolen, but my work has been misrepresented. ~ Michael Heizer

The intellectual's hostility to the businessman presents no mystery, as the two have, by function, wholly different standards. While the businessman's motto is the customer is always right, the intellectual's task is to preserve his perceived standards against the weight of popular opinion. ~ Bertrand De Jouvenel

It is not enough to say that you are upset with something if you don't do anything to change it. If you want to know who a person truly is see what they do. Do they only talk or do they actually walk the walk! What do they get involved with? Making the world better or trying to divide us by pitting us against each other. Beware of the person that tries to divide and conquer ~ Johnny Corn