Political Conscience Quotes

I think you have a social responsibility as the villain, which is pretty different from the hero's responsibility. If you have any kind of a social or political conscience at all, the first thing you want to do is make malevolence recognizable to people, almost as a kind of teaching aid. ~ Peter Coyote

We believe in the vocation of communion and participation of our people, who day to day awaken to their political conscience and express their desire for change and profound democratization of society. A change based on justice, built with love, and which will bring us the most anxiously desired fruits of peace. ~ Adolfo Perez Esquivel

The nation demands a movement which has written upon its banner the internal and external national freedom that it will act as if it were the spiritual, social and political conscience of the nation. ~ Franz Von Papen

We even save a few lives, but only a fraction of the lives that need to be saved. Soon, we will leave and when we leave there will be nothing to take our place. The meningitis epidemic, cholera, measles, typhoid fever, all preventable diseases, will return and continue as before. The only solution is a political solution, national public health programs, responsible corporations who reap only as much as they sow. Shell Oil with a conscience. Nigeria doesn't need us. What we do here is less than nothing. We take the pressure off the powers that be, making it easier for those who plunder to keep on plundering. This is the humanitarian aid paradox. ~ Pamela Grim

We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter
exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place
the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. ~ Mark Twain

I grew up at a time where I think most people had a social and political conscience. Some of the biggest changes in our country's political history happened at the time I was growing up, so I was raised to be a part of those things and to participate and I will continue to do that as much as I can. ~ George Clooney

Pamela, even at a distance, was the voice of her conscience, but then it was very easy to have a conscience from a distance. ~ Kate Atkinson

American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare to differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people. ~ Rep. Luther Johnson D.-Texas In The Debate That Preceded The Radio Act Of 1927 KPFA 1 16 03

We do need brothers and sisters to go into elected offices and political offices and do that, but my spirit is telling me something different. Because you are a Democrat or Republican you have to do this but you can't do that and so it's somewhat limiting in what you can actually do and I've done that. ~ Kwame Kilpatrick

I shouldn't be held responsible for my acts, since I was a political idiot, an artist who could not distinguish between reality and dreams ~ Kurt Vonnegut

A complete history of sexual scandal in Washington will probably never be written, because the public does not want to read a 20,000 page book that needs to be updated weekly (note to self: maybe they DO -- idea for next book). From the earliest days of the Republic, when our first Ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, fondled and groped the awestruck wives of his French hosts while on mission to Paris, shortly to be succeeded by the even-more-amorous Thomas Jefferson, who broke an ankle in the Louvre while leaping to an assignation with yet another married Frenchwoman, all the way down to our contemporary satyrs, the priapic Kennedys, Wilbur "Fanne Fox" Mills, "Slobbering Bob" Packwood, Bill "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" Clinton, etc., our political leaders have repeatedly proven to be incredibly horny old goats. ~ Guillermo Jiménez

ANYONE who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them - instead of answering their arguments. ~ Thomas Sowell

This independent report clearly indicates that while we may differ among ourselves in government about what to spend money on, we have one of the most reliable and non-political processes for agreeing on how much money there is. We don't play games with the numbers. ~ Ruth Ann Minner

A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind. ~ Richard Hofstadter

Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a constant submission to it. ~ Alexander Herzen

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

I'm driven by issues, not driven to be political. ~ Kevin McCloud

The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. ~ Wendell Berry

One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there. ~ Bell Hooks

It continues to startle me, the range of political ideologies that are compatible with enthusiasm for spaceflight. Tax-and-spend liberals of the Great Society stripe, obviously - but also spending-slashing Tea Partiers, hippie peaceniks, fierce libertarians, military loyalists, and apathetics of every shade. So very many of us seem to feel that a love of human spaceflight is reconcilable with our beliefs, and we can all explain why. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

One of the most annoying habits of liberals is their tendency to confuse their political agenda with moral virtue. ~ Robert Stacy McCain

My political ideas and things like that, even my religion, I try to keep close to me because it's a personal thing, and I don't shove it down people's throats. I don't condemn any artist that wants to do that, like the Baldwins. That's their choice. But in my world, I'm just an entertainer. ~ Donny Osmond

Since Christ is the Word of God and the Truth of God, he may be received even by those who have not heard of his manifestation in the flesh ... We have, therefore. the hope that even among the heathen there may be some, like Socrates, who, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit working through the truth of nature and conscience, have found the way of life and salvation. ~ Augustus Hopkins Strong

There is no difference in a country between military, economic, and political affairs. It's useful for Business Insider to divide things that way. That's useful for a college program. But a country is a country. How do you understand China's economy without China's army? If you take these all into account you're ready to explain a question like, "How come the US doesn't have a debt problem?" ~ George Friedman

Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility - for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. ~ Carl Sagan

Saying the Washington Post is just a newspaper is like saying Rasputin was just a country priest. ~ Pat Buchanan

The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty ... Only a moral revolution
not a social or a political revolution
only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but a stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich. ~ Stephen J. Field

It is impossible to rise to freedom, from the midst of corruptions, without strong convulsions. They are the salutary crises of a serious disease. We are in want of a terrible political fever, to carry off our foul humors. ~ Madame Roland

I read American sagas (of the west) and I do not see people who went in search of material things. I see people who wrote down that what they sought was an escape from an old world which dictated their conscience and established their merit based on who their parents. ~ Alan Keyes

We do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things - and above all on ourselves. ~ Karl Popper

No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I hate to speak for the whole society, but I will. I'm a journalist, it's my job. There's been something of a reaction against political correctness. Needless to say, the government hasn't caught up yet. ~ Dave Barry

... Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I don't know what will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity. We're more popular than Jesus now. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me. ~ John Lennon

Think about that. Two hundred and eighty-five new or expanded programs, $2 trillion more in new spending, and not one new bureaucrat to file out the forms or answer the phones? ~ George W. Bush

Epictetus would reject this manner of dealing with insults as being woefully counterproductive. He would point out, to begin with, that the political correctness movement has some untoward side effects. One is that the process of protecting disadvantaged individuals from insults will tend to make them hypersensitive to insults: They will, as a result, feel the sting not only of direct insults but of implied insults as well. ~ William B. Irvine

It is surely obvious by now that the authorities whether political, administrative, corporate, scientific, academic or media mislead us all the time either by themselves being misled or by downright lies. I don't mean little ones, either, but enormous distortions of truth and reality. By far the safest filter system is to believe nothing The System tells us until it proves worthy of acceptance, and with every day that passes this gets less and less likely - with whoppers becoming ever more whopping. Keep asking the question 'Who benefits?' - Who benefits from me believing what they are telling me? Remember that words don't change the world only outcomes do. The outcome will invariably tell you who was behind events that justified or led to the outcome and you can see the process at an earlier stage by asking when an event happens - what will be the outcome if I believe what they are telling me? ~ David Icke

We think when God speaks to us, there's going to be a boom out of Heaven or we're going to get some chill bumps, but I really believe God's talking to us all the time. He's talking to us right in here. I call it our heart, our conscience, but it's the Holy Spirit talking to us. ~ Joel Osteen

When any institution becomes large and compartmentalized, with departments and subdepartments, then the conscience of the institution will often become so fragmented and diluted as to be virtually nonexistent, and the organization becomes inherently evil. ~ M. Scott Peck

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

From the standpoint of modern political science the slave holders were right in declaring that liberty can be given only to those who have political capacity enough to use it, and they were also right in maintaining that two greatly unequal races cannot exist side by side on terms of perfect equality. ~ Charles Edward Merriam

Therefore, our fight must primarily be a political mass struggle with revolutionary goals. ~ Joe Slovo

I am naturally addicted to venery, I have little ambition and am not at all avaricious. Education has further limited my scope. Having been brought up in society, I am impregnated with its laws; not only should I be afraid of taking a holiday from them, I should also feel it painful to try to do so. In a word, I have conscience as well as fear of gaol. Yes, I know it by experience. How often have I tried to take holidays, to get away from myself, my own boring nature, my insufferable mental surroundings! But always without success. ~ Aldous Huxley

It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the political offender to act. ~ Emma Goldman

These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or totally negligent of their duty. ~ Edmund Burke

It does not become America that within her borders, where every man is free to follow the dictates of his conscience, men should raise the cry of church against church. To do that is to strike at the very spirit and heart of America. ~ Woodrow Wilson

God accentuate our mind with exact words to write. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The people are fed up with their elected officials playing the blame game and treating their political counterparts as enemies. ~ Carl Lewis

Feminism as a political movement has to specifically address the needs of men in their struggle to revolutionize their consciousness. ~ Bell Hooks

It is our duty to endeavor always to promote the general good; to do to all as we would be willing to be done by were we in their circumstances; to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God. These are some of the laws of nature which every man in the world is bound to observe, and which whoever violates exposes himself to the resentment of mankind, the lashes of his own conscience, and the judgment of Heaven. This plainly shows that the highest state of liberty subjects us to the law of nature and the government of God. ~ Samuel West

We've got to figure out a way to cause communities to also want them, the political, organized bodies. ~ Lee Scott

Emily Zanotti is a Republican political strategist and author. She is a regular contributor to The American Spectator and a featured opinion columnist with The Wall Street Journal. Her work has appeared across the political spectrum, in National Review, The Daily Caller, Slate, and elsewhere. ~ Joanne Bamberger

Had I represented twenty thousand voters in Michigan, that political editor would not have known nor cared whether I was the oldest or the youngest daughter of Methuselah, or whether my bonnet came from the Ark or from Worth's. ~ Susan B. Anthony

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. ~ James Madison

(Asked by John King about the political climate that existed in Washington at the time, and criticism of the Department of Justice under his management) Listen I don't expect an apology from men like Chuck Schumer, and I would put him and other individuals who were attacking me at the top of the list contributing to the low, low public perception of Congress, the integrity of Congress quite frankly. ~ Alberto Gonzales