Political Pgilosophy Quotes

Empire always overreaches itself and thus dies by its own hand victim of its own ambitions ~ Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

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

Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.

More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime's projects is to lim ~ Timothy Snyder

Listening to the shrill rhetoric of hard line Brexiteers - either extolling the virtues of a 'no deal' Brexit, or suggesting its inevitability is simply down to the intransigence of the EU - I am reminded of another great folly in British history: 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. It is as if we are witnessing a modern day re-enactment of that foolhardy military manoeuvre in which a mix of poor communication, rash decisions and vainglorious personalities led to the needless massacre of countless cavalrymen. Messrs. Fox, Johnson and Rees-Mogg may relish the idea of charging headlong into battle against a well prepared and strongly defended position, immune to the ensuing casualties and collateral damage. It would be appreciated if they could kindly leave the rest of us out of their futile and reckless endeavours. ~ Alex Morritt

Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency! ~ Chinua Achebe

If a man ... would shake and not be shaken, grip and not be gripped, taking care always to squeeze the hand of his adversary as hard as it squeezed him, then he suffered no inconvenience from it. ~ James K. Polk

I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right. ~ Harold Pinter

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

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

One of the reasons that I went to Mexico aside from the Maya and the pre-Columbian aspect of it was that I wanted to work with [Diego] Rivera, which I did, on a mural that he was painting at the time. But at some point I realized that I wasn't going to be a political artist, it just wasn't in my repertoire. ~ Michelle Stuart

It should be emphasized that the balagtasan also served a higher social and political function. More than mere entertainment, it enhanced the tradition role of the poet as purveyor of truth for the people. ~ Virgilio S. Almario

One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends. ~ Bell Hooks

Like it or not, war (cold or hot) is the most powerful funding driver in the public arsenal. Lofty goals such as curiosity, discovery, exploration, and science can get you money for modest-size projects, provided they resonate with the political and cultural views of the moment. But big, expensive activities are inherently long term, and require sustained investment that must survive economic fluctuations and changes in the political winds. In all eras, across time and culture, only war, greed, and the celebration of royal or religious power have fulfilled that funding requirement. Today, the power of kings is supplanted by elected governments, and the power of religion is often expressed in nonarchitectural undertakings, leaving war and greed to run the show. Sometimes those two drivers work hand in hand, as in the art of profiteering from the art of war. But war itself remains the ultimate and most compelling rationale. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

It's like how science fiction in the '50s was a way of talking about war without actually having to risk any political capital. The obvious metaphor is power and powerlessness, but I also think it's a way of experimenting with dangerous feelings in a safe arena and trying things out. ~ Margaret Stohl

How can a governing party propose to its people a referendum that won't be binding? Is that a serious political programme? No it is not. It's the final option that will end up with upset, at a dead end, reflecting the last 4 years of the Ibarretxe Plan ~ Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero

Every film is a political act; it's how you see the world. ~ Mira Nair

Political convictions then were of the utmost importance, so intensely felt that it was difficult even for well-balanced and temperate men to think of the opposition party without bitterness. To the rank and file of the Federalists, the Democrats seemed a vulgar, ignorant mob at best, at worst a group of "knaves and blockheads." To the Democrats, the Federalists appeared abandoned traitors fawning at the feet of the British government, a blindly selfish aristocracy who deserved little better treatment than the French nobility had received a few years before during the Reign of Terror. ~ William Edward Buckley

I have, however, to live in an age of Faith - the sort of thing I used to hear praised and recommended when I was a boy. It is damned unpleasant, really. It is bloody in every sense of the word. And I have to keep my end up in it. Where do I start?

With personal relationships. Here is something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty. Not absolutely solid... We don't know what other people are like. How then can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we can't. But in practice we can and do. Though A is unchangeably A or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two. For the purpose of loving one has to assume that the personality is solid, and the "self" is an entity, and to ignore all contrary evidence. And since to ignore evidence is one of the characteristics of faith, I certainly can proclaim that I believe in personal relationships. ~ E. M. Forster

We had a military and political leadership at that period which was genuinely deluded. ~ Neil Sheehan

Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity. ~ Rudolf Rocker

I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science). ~ Lloyd DeMause

I saw America's economy last night, people raiding dumpsters at a higher rate than normal in my home town. Digging through garbage shouldn't be a career. Thanks Democrats. Thanks Republicans. ~ Carroll Bryant

If only the court had acted more slowly,' RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women's equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had 'halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue. (85). ~ Irin Carmon

I don't think that what's going on in Bosnia is political activity. It's partly political, but it's partly atavistic as well. ~ John Keegan

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event. ~ Fernand Braudel

The method I take to do this is not yet very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature. ~ William Petty

In the end we are all sacked and it's always awful. It is as inevitable as death following life. If you are elevated there comes a day when you are demoted. Even Prime Ministers. ~ Alan Clark

The phone rang. It was a familiar voice.

It was Alan Greenspan. Paul O'Neill had tried to stay in touch with people who had served under Gerald Ford, and he'd been reasonably conscientious about it. Alan Greenspan was the exception. In his case, the effort was constant and purposeful. When Greenspan was the chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and O'Neill was number two at OMB, they had become a kind of team. Never social so much. They never talked about families or outside interests. It was all about ideas: Medicare financing or block grants - a concept that O'Neill basically invented to balance federal power and local autonomy - or what was really happening in the economy. It became clear that they thought well together. President Ford used to have them talk about various issues while he listened. After a while, each knew how the other's mind worked, the way married couples do.

In the past fifteen years, they'd made a point of meeting every few months. It could be in New York, or Washington, or Pittsburgh. They talked about everything, just as always. Greenspan, O'Neill told a friend, "doesn't have many people who don't want something from him, who will talk straight to him. So that's what we do together - straight talk."

O'Neill felt some straight talk coming in.

"Paul, I'll be blunt. We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make lasting changes. We could be a team at the key moment, t ~ Ron Suskind

Kim Il Sung not only presided over the birth of a new nation in an old land, he was inextricably bound to the fate of North Korea. Perhaps to a greater degree than any other modern political leader, he may be seen as the full embodiment of the state. Indeed, Kim was more integral to state and society in North Korea than Stalin in the Soviet Union, or Mao in China. ~ Kim Il-sung

Putting it as strongly as I can, the failure to give free airtime for our political campaigns endangers our democracy. ~ Walter Cronkite

You have to look also to the media, where you have a vast majority of the loudest and most influential political voices in America media from people who came from the entertainment world. ~ Ben Affleck

I disagree with the analysis that you've put about what happened in relation to the student demonstrations and protests and the incident with the Prince of Wales' car. We're very clear that we have to separate out the political responsibility from operational responsibility of the police. ~ Theresa May

The whole thing was done for internal political reasons to galvanize and unify the country against the Americans, and if they hadn't had that immediate opportunity they would have found another one. ~ Lloyd Cutler

She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag. ~ Julian Critchley

Above all, political discussion is stunned by a delusion about science. This term has come to mean an institutional enterprise rather than a personal activity, the solving of puzzles rather than the unpredictably creative activity of individual people. Science is now used to label a spectral production agency which turns out better knowledge just as medicine produces better health. The damage done by this misunderstanding about the nature of knowledge is even more fundamental than the damage done to the conceptions of health, education, or mobility by their identification with institutional outputs. False expectations
of better health corrupt society, but they do so in only one particular sense. They foster a declining concern with healthful environments, healthy life styles, and competence in the personal care of one's neighbor. Deceptions about health are circumstantial. The institutionalization of knowledge leads to a more general and degrading delusion. It makes people
dependent on having their knowledge produced for them. It leads to a paralysis of the moral and political imagination. ~ Ivan Illich

Captured by the ideological animus, both socialist and liberal-democratic art abandoned the criterion of beauty - considered anachronistic and of dubious political value - and replaced it with the criterion of correctness. ~ Ryszard Legutko

Although crack cocaine had not yet hit the streets when the War on Drugs was declared in 1982, its appearance a few years later created the perfect opportunity for the Reagan administration to build support for its new war. Drug use, once considered a private, public-health matter, was reframed through political rhetoric and media imagery as a grave threat to the national order. ~ Michelle Alexander

Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game. ~ Terence McKenna

LORD BOLINGBROKE, the eighteenth-century political philosopher, said that "history is philosophy teaching by examples." Thucydides is reported to have said much the same thing two thousand years earlier. Jefferson ~ David McCullough