Political Decisions Quotes

Hurry, conscious younger people! Get to power quickly so political decisions can be based on the greater good for all rather than the greater gain for few. Hurry, before it is too late! ~ Jane Siberry

But particularly when the media profess to strive toward objectivity, gatekeepers play a crucial role in helping people navigate the news to make educated political decisions. ~ Eric Alterman

The decline of religious belief,which has all sorts of effects on morals and even on politics because religion has been a tool of politics. But today in Europe it ceases to be a tool, it has very little influence in determining political decisions - ~ Will Durant

If I want to make political decisions, I should stand for election. If I want to do something in the legal field, that's different; that is my - they are my qualifications, but you know, the politicians are the ones who stand up there and are answerable to the people. ~ Cherie Blair

My concern is to keep religion and the state separated. I don't think that religion and politics go together. When you see political decisions colored by religion, decisions that affect us all ... I thought: 'I do not want to go back to medieval times.' ~ Bjorn Ulvaeus

European government is a clear expression I still use, you need time, but step by step, as in the Austrian case, the European Commission takes a political decision and behaves like a growing government. ~ Romano Prodi

The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn't hear, doesn't speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn't know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn't know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies. ~ Bertolt Brecht

[ ... ] it would be false to say that because we're on the side of justice, we can go ahead and destroy our opponents and the world will be at peace. [ ... ] Now, I know that there are such things as good and evil in the world, and that people do good things. But people who do good things are not necessarily good people, they just happen to be people who have done good things. The next instant they might wind up doing something bad, and if we don't take that into account in our view of humans, we'll constantly make mistakes when making political decisions or decisions about ourselves. ~ Hayao Miyazaki

There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions. At other times, no act
no campaign or tract, statement or rampage
has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics. At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and a frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. "There's one," it said. That was in the 1960's. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what? ~ Renata Adler

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the 'freedom' of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretences. Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, have been and are taken unilaterally without any open consultation or participation. Both ~ John Berger

Kaylin hated politics. Hated them. She hated the stupid decisions, the game playing, the grandstanding. She hated political decisions made by people who never had to do any of the law's actual work. She hated the pervasive sense of superiority and smugness that underlay all of the rules. ~ Michelle Sagara

'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions. ~ Natasha Trethewey

The illusion of feeling well-informed....a public that feels informed in proportion as it is to befuddled. In one of his characteristic pronouncements, at a press conference in May 1962, John F. Kennedy proclaimed the end of ideology in words that appealed to both these public needs-the need to believe that political decisions are in the hands of dispassionate, bipartisan experts and the need to believe that the problems experts deal with are unintelligible to laymen. ~ Christopher Lasch

If the layman cannot participate in decision making, he will have to turn himself over, essentially blind, to a hermetic elite ... [The fundamental question becomes] are we still capable of self-government and therefore freedom? Margaret Mead wrote in a 1959 issue of Daedalus about scientists elevated to the status of priests. Now there is a name for this elevation, when you are in the hands of-one hopes-a benevolent elite, when you have no control over your political decisions. From the point of view of John Locke, the name for this is slavery. ~ Gerald Holton

The same individuals who are doing primary research in the role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to lead the [IPCC] assessment! There should be an outcry on this obvious conflict of interest, but to date either few recognize this conflict, or see that since the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda, they chose to ignore this conflict. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow. ~ Roger A. Pielke

I never participated in far-reaching political decisions, since I never belonged to the circle of the closest associates of Adolf Hitler, neither was I consulted by Adolf Hitler on general political questions, nor did I ever take part in conferences about such problems. ~ Hans Frank

Today's energy mix is the result of yesterday's consumer habits, considerable investment, and various political decisions. The potential of renewable energies, now a well-established fact, is undeniable if given the time to arrive at the technical and economic maturity that will free them from subsidization policies. ~ Christophe De Margerie

Politicians and bureaucrats are substituting their uninformed, largely political decisions for those of the marketplace. Their past miscalculations demonstrate that they do not and cannot possess the information, knowledge, means, and discipline to manage the economy. ~ Mark Levin

Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs. ~ Matt Ridley

Paying more heed to the lessons of the past might teach us to be a little more cautious about some of the political decisions taken today. ~ Michael Morpurgo

If the court is a political institution making important political decisions, then the public should debate the politics of Supreme Court decisions. ~ Marvin Ammori

The last eight years have created a lot of deep-seated hostility. People take political decisions very personally, and today there is a constant, ongoing attack, with one side or the other being maligned. ~ Fred F. Fielding

The framers of the Constitution realized that ... there needed to be some guardian of the sober second thought, and so they created the Senate to fulfill that high and vitally important duty. ~ Elihu Root

Don't be adamant; don't make up your mind about all the things that don't even have anything at all to do with you. Don't be too quick to define right and wrong. Life has a way of putting the adamant person into the very situations they've made up their minds about, in order to change those very decisions. So, unless you want the things that you judge in others to happen to you, you'd better live and let live. ~ C. JoyBell C.

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

Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Observe the nature of today's alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism tocommunism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens; it means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed. Consider the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the brutality, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by dictatorships. Yet this is what today's alleged peace-lovers are willing to advocate or tolerate - in the name of love for humanity. ~ Ayn Rand

The beginning of my political career was not promising. I ran for junior class president at Shortridge High school and was runner up. I ran again in the senior year with the same result. But opportunity came ironically, or fortunately, when I returned to Indianapolis after serving in the Navy. ~ Richard Lugar

Zero-sum thinking is a name for envy. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, gives an apt description of the "House of Envy" (as a poet in that most zero-sum of political systems, the Roman empire, might): "Envy within, busy at the meal of snake's flesh... her tongue dripped venom. Only the sight of suffering could bring a smile to her lips. She never knew the comfort of sleep, but... looked with dismay on men's good fortune... She could hardly refrain from weeping when she saw no cause for tears." I didn't know Hillary Clinton's involvement in politics dated back to the reign of Augustus. Then ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Politics is all about getting and keeping power, and in politics, the professionals in the business soon learn that the only way to get and keep power is to force people to talk to them. A full-time legislature thinks of more and more things to regulate and discuss. ~ Ray Haynes

I believe that I'm entitled to regard my pre-political life as off-limits in terms of what can be looked at and judged. ~ George Osborne

The next General Election isn't about electing yet another Labour or Tory MP to join the hundreds of other Labour or Tory MPs in London. It will be about electing a candidate who will put solving people's problems before scoring political points. Someone who will fight for the future of our communities here in Clwyd West. ~ Llyr Huws Gruffydd

Nation state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

There are so many classic Big Brother warning books: the Internet is a horrible, controlling thing, as if it has a consciousness or political agenda. ~ Joshua Cohen

In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality. ~ Leon Trotsky

To have internal peace and stability and economic development, it is important to have good relations with the political parties that we have in our country. That is why we have had engagement with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. ~ Thein Sein

The Duke of Wellington brought to the post of first minister immortal fame,-a quality of success which would almost seem to include all others. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

That there would be a political advantage in having the declaration written by a Virginian was clear, for the same reason there had been political advantage in having the Virginian Washington in command of the army. But be that as it may, Jefferson, with his "peculiar felicity of expression," as Adams said, was the best choice for the task, just as Washington had been the best choice to command the Continental Army, and again Adams had played a key part. Had his contributions as a member of Congress been only that of casting the two Virginians in their respective, fateful roles, his service to the American cause would have been very great. ~ David McCullough

Paine knew that class tensions existed. He understood that revolutions stirred up resentments. In Common Sense, he adopted an ominous tone at a key point in his argument, warning readers that the time was ripe to declare independence and form a stable government. Or else. In the current state of things, "the mind of the multitude is left at random," he wrote, and "the property of no man is secure." Therefore, if the leadership class did not seize hold of the narrative, the broad appeal to political independence would be supplanted by an incendiary call for social leveling. ~ Nancy Isenberg

The polarization of Congress; the decline of civility; and the rise of attack politics in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early years of the new century are a blot on our political system and a disservice to the American people. ~ Edward Brooke

You teach your kids about your beliefs and tell them what you think is right and the conclusions that you've come to from living in the world, and then they can make their own decisions. ~ Flea

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

There are a lot of decisions to make, creatively. Now, with digital, you can really be the author of your own work. From the beginning to the end of the process, you control everything. ~ Gregory Heisler

I think a lot of bad things have happened in the name of the church and in the name of Christ and therefore I shy away from church. ~ John Lennon

In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate. ~ Rene Descartes

PROLOGUE Equinox: Whispers of Destiny
Have you ever had the feeling that someone was playing with your destiny? If so, this book is for you.
Destiny is certainly a topic people like to talk about. Wherever we go, we hear it mentioned in conversations or proverbs that seek to lay bare its mysteries.

If we analyze people's attitude towards destiny a little, we find straight away that at one extreme there are those who believe that everything in life is planned by a higher power and that therefore things always happen for a reason, even though our limited human understanding cannot comprehend why. In that perspective, everything is preordained, regardless of what we do or don't do.

At the other extreme we find the I can do it! Believers. These focus on themselves: anything is possible if done with conviction, as part of the plan that they have drawn up themselves as the architects of their own destiny.

We can safely say that everything happens for a reason. Whether it's because of decisions we take or simply because circumstances determine it, there is always more causation than coincidence in life. But sometimes such strange things happen. The most insignificant occurrence or decision can give way to the most unexpected futures.

Indeed, such twists of fate may well be the reason why you are reading my book now. Do you have any idea of the number of events, circumstances and decisions that had to conspire for me to writ ~ Gonzalo Guma

Entrepreneurs make fast decisions and move forward knowing that at best 70% of their decisions are going to be right. They move the ball forward every day. They are quick to spot their mistakes and correct. ~ Mark Suster

I think politicians know how to misrepresent data in order to support a political agenda. Politicians and the people that work for them - I should say - are expert at that. ~ Seth Gordon

State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. ~ Benito Mussolini

I am absolutely opposed to political correctness. You cannot confront hate speech until you've experienced it. You need to hear every side of the issue instead of just one. ~ Jane Elliott

In a technological world facing many global problems, everyone needs to have a basic understanding of science. And knowing where we came from and helps us to make decisions about the future. ~ Wyken Seagrave

There is an absolute power that truly empowers without corrupting ~ Constance Friday

As we go from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to Mitt Romney, I now understand why the Republicans don't believe in evolution. ~ Andy Borowitz

I learned from Ridley [Scott] how to come out of the trailer at a fast walk and make your decisions and keep it going. We were very much on time and under budget, as they say. That was a very important thing for me and very satisfactory. ~ William Monahan

What the political left, even in democratic countries, share is the notion that knowledgeable and virtuous people like themselves have both a right and a duty to use the power of government to impose their superior knowledge and virtue on others. ~ Thomas Sowell

Being political doesn't only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election; to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers. ~ Alain De Botton

A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics[.] ~ Harold Bloom

Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly. ~ Gretel Ehrlich

An enemy should be struck at his weak point. ~ Chanakya

Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech, if the first assault on its freedom can be said to be restricting, or handcuffing speech. The day she heard "redneck" on NPR, she turned NPR off, not because broadcasters were still using the term, but because she knew one day they would not be. In fact, she had a vision of the quiet moment backstage at a Boston studio when a good, surprised correspondent was let go for saying "redneck" the last time it would be said. ~ Padgett Powell

Decisions made quickly were almost always regretted quickly. ~ J.D. Robb

Beliefs lead us to make decisions based on our past experiences. Principles lead us to make decisions based on what we perceive to be just and righteous. ~ Philip West

In part, the deep-space mobile battle station was meant to put an end to harassments of any sort, whether driven by greed, political dissent, or revenge for acts committed during the Clone Wars or since. Once everyone in the galaxy grasped the weapon's capabilities, once the fear of Imperial reprisal took hold, discontent would cease to be a problem. ~ James Luceno

Saddam Hussein's mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars ... In a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data. ~ Richard Dawkins

Only careful political manoeuvring will be able to manage the situation. ~ Davan Yahya Khalil

I know I can be accused of sacrilege in writing about political economy in the style of a novel about love or pirates. But I confess I get a pain from reading valuable works by certain sociologists, political experts, economists and historians who write in code. ~ Eduardo Galeano

Restoring trust, reinventing political parties, finding new ways in which average citizens can meaningfully participate in the political process, creating new mechanisms of effective governance, limiting the worst impacts of checks and balances while averting excessive concentrations of unaccountable power, and enhancing the capacity of nation-states to work together should be the central political goals of our time. ~ Moises Naim