Political Talks Quotes

say what the masses want just to win the masses and never do what the masses want and you will loose the masses ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Poshlust," or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature - these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as "America is no better than Russia" or "We all share in Germany's guilt." The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as "the moment of truth," "charisma," "existential" (used seriously), "dialogue" (as applied to political talks between nations), and "vocabulary" (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name - that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost's favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wrec ~ Vladimir Nabokov

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell. ~ Thomas Merton

It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century. ~ Annalee Newitz

I became active in politics because I saw the possibility, if we all sat back and did nothing, of a world in which there would no longer be any stages for actors to act on. ~ Helen Gahagan

Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it. ~ Michel Foucault

I like walking heavy on these disease-ridden streets. I like walking the streets knowing that underneath my jacket is the perfect solution to any dilemma I might encounter. I look at people differently. I meet their gaze until they look away. I like taking my gun for walks. I do not believe in hope. I do not believe that people are going to someday get it together and live in peace and harmony. I don't have time for political correctness. I'm not going to try to talk my way out of a bad situation. I'm just going to shoot the fucker in the face and be done with it. ~ Henry Rollins

The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them. ~ Harold Pinter

Sadly, far too many politicians in Washington lack the courage to do something to fix our problems. They are worried about the political implications of making the hard choices we so desperately need to cut spending and shrink government. ~ Matt Salmon

There are actually no political aspirations. I think you need to have the right attitude and aptitude for it. I don't think I have the right aptitude for it. I think it is unfair to push somebody in that direction just because my father happens to be a politician. ~ Sonakshi Sinha

A person or a ruler who executes his plans (of public welfare) after due consideration, the prosperity stands with him for a longer period. ~ Chanakya

Italian politicians are stupid and expensive, that's why they should be fired, abolished, or better eliminated. ~ William C. Brown

This is the hallmark of a robust biological system: political parties can perish in a tragic accident and the society will still run, sometimes with little more than a hiccup to the system. It may be that for every strange clinical case in which brain damage leads to a bizarre change in behavior or perception, there are hundreds of cases in which parts of the brain are damaged with no detectable clinical sign. ~ David Eagleman

Consider the past; such great changes of political supremacies. Thou mayest foresee also the things which will be. For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of the things which take place now: accordingly to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more wilt thou see? ~ Marcus Aurelius

They may be just as intelligent as you say. But I'd feel a helluva lot better if just one of them had ever run for sheriff. ~ Sam Rayburn

May my words give grace to those who hear, my words are not pep talks. I hope, indeed, that my words are not even my own, but Christ's working through me. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

No person shall be capable of being a delegate for more than three years in any term of six. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Political scientists after World War II hypothesized that even though the voices of individual Americans counted for little, most people belonged to a variety of interest groups and membership organizations - clubs, associations, political parties, unions - to which politicians were responsive. ~ Robert Reich

I've never been invited to do an exhibition or do a talk in England, except once, about 10 years ago. I've given talks all across Canada, many in the United States, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan - but not England. ~ Brian Wildsmith

I don't mean a 1905 Republican---I don't know what his Tennessee politics were, or if he had any---I mean a 1961 Republican. He was more: he was a Conservative. Like this: a Republican is a mad who made his money; a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooted Liberal in a cross-country race; a Conservative is a Republican who has learned to read and write. ~ William Faulkner

Great upheavals produce shock waves that widen cracks in political, economic, and security orders. Sometimes the old orders break. Yet it can be in the power of leaders and peoples to shape the directions of change. ~ Robert Zoellick

Civic virtue is not best justified in terms of fair play in a cooperative enterprise for mutual advantage, because citizenship is not a strictly reciprocal relationship in which people receive benefits in proportion to their contributions, but a joint relationship that realises the common good of freedom and self-government. ~ Iseult Honohan

A man said to the universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,' replied the universe. 'The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation. ~ Stephen Crane

I've always been very interested in political violence. When I finished high school, I did a small dissertation about political violence and fascism in Italy. ~ Loretta Napoleoni

I really love that I'm giving myself the opportunity finally to not have the pressure of every single song you do having to be "political" or whatever. I'm just making what I wanna make. ~ Kathleen Hanna

In my experience of these things, parties which shout about dirty tricks and the like tend to do so because they fear a direct hit in some vulnerable part of their political anatomy. ~ Peter Mandelson

Since the intervention in Afghanistan, we suddenly began to notice when, in political discussions, we found ourselves only among Europeans or Israelis. ~ Jurgen Habermas

It remains to be seen, for example whether China can continue to develop as a market economy while still retaining an authoritarian communist political system. ~ Peter Dicken

The comics that are just conversing with you up there and drawing on their own life, yeah, I guess so. I guess some do political humor, some do topical humor, but the ones that I like, the ones that are appealing to me, were guys who were just talking to you about their life. ~ Ray Romano

The triviality of American popular culture, its emptiness and gossip, accelerates this destruction of critical thought. It expands the void, the mindlessness that makes the magic, mythology, and irrationality of the Christian Right palatable. Television, the movement's primary medium, allows viewers to preoccupy themselves with context-free information. The homogenized empty chatter on the airwaves, the banal amusement and clichés, the bizarre doublespeak endlessly repeated on cable news channels and the huge spectacles in sports stadiums have replaced America's political, social and moral life, indeed replaced community itself. Television lends itself perfectly to this world of signs and wonders, to the narcissism of national and religious self-exaltation. Television discourages real communication. Its rapid frames and movements, its constant use of emotional images, its sudden shifts from one theme to an unrelated theme, banish logic and reason with dizzying perplexity. It, too, makes us feel good. It, too, promises to protect and serve us. It, too, promises to life us up and thrill us. The televangelists have built their movement on these commercial precepts. The totalitarian creed of the Religious Right has found in television the perfect medium. Its leaders know how television can be used to seduce and encourage us to walk away from dwindling, less exciting collectives that protect and nurture us. They have mastered television's imperceptible, slowly induced hypnosis. An ~ Chris Hedges

We believe that only government has the capacity
not to mention the political and moral responsibility
to promote the general welfare.
Father Kramer as quoted in Sweet Charity? ~ Janet Poppendieck

Global warming is a political issue. It is as much a political issue to the left as abortion is. It's as big a political issue as health care is. ~ Rush Limbaugh

In fact, I should say to begin with that the term anarchism is quite a range of political ideas, but I would prefer to think of it as the libertarian left, and from that point of view anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist, in the tradition of say Bakunin and Kropotkin and others. They had in mind a highly organized form of society, but a society that was organized on the basis of organic units, organic communities. And generally they meant by that the workplace and the neighborhood, and from those two basic units there could derive through federal arrangements a highly integrated kind of social organization, which might be national or even international in scope. And the decisions could be made over a substantial range, but by delegates who are always part of the organic community from which they come, to which they return and in which, in fact, they live. ~ Noam Chomsky

The same powerful Scripture text that brings a loving person to even greater love will be mangled and misused by a fearful or egocentric person. This is surely what Jesus means when he talks about the one who has being given more and those who have not losing what little they have. ~ Richard Rohr