Political Theoryory Quotes

Multi-lateralism's dilemma: that the inclusion of more actors increases the legitimacy of a process or organization at the same time as it decreases its efficiency and utility. ~ Richard N. Haass

When men organize themselves into groups, and they make rules based on common or self-interest, it's always tangled and political. ~ Andrew Dominik

The avoidance of explicit ethical judgments leads political scientists to one overriding implicit value judgment - that in favor of the political status quo as it happens to prevail in any given society. ~ Murray Rothbard

The Delores tank rolled on inexorably, "You get a mortgage to buy a house, a larger mortgage than the previous owner because the price of the house has been artificially increased by the market, which is controlled by the banks. Then you live in the house for a few years paying a lot more in mortgage payments than you would if you were renting a similar property. But hey, you 'own' it and can 'do things to it'… things that cost even more money, by the way… so you maintain its upkeep, improve it with say a new kitchen or bathroom; the more salubrious the neighbourhood the more expensive the kitchen would need to be – a Küche & Cucina, say; impressing your cleaner is very important after all and at the end you sell it to someone else for more than you paid for it so they'll need an even bigger mortgage. And all the while everyone is paying all this money to the banks and the banks give the money to their shareholders, the biggest of whom are the incredibly rich. This, when you boil it all down, means that you're taking a large sum out of your wages and passing it across to some rich person to live large, whilst you and others like you struggle to make their monthly payments. Basically you've been screwed, Doc, but somehow they've convinced you that you own a bit of England, when the truth is you don't really own anything, you're just renting it at a higher cost and they can take it back from you any time they want. It's all just a card trick, Doc. All just 'smoke and mirror ~ Arun D. Ellis

All secret oath-bound political parties are dangerous to any nation, no matter how pure or how patriotic the motives and principles which first bring them together. ~ Ulysses S. Grant

One of the big changes in the Congress since I first came to Washington is that all of these folks go home every weekend. They used to play golf together; their families got to know each other, go to dinner at each other's homes at weekends - and these would be people who were political adversaries. ~ Robert M. Gates

Not only our political system is broken, but how we do business and have public discourse with one another. The system in Hollywood, specifically, is not depicting people of color; we're not even talking about Asian Americans or Latino Americans; we're not even getting into that question. ~ Isaiah Washington

Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money. ~ George Carlin

Incumbents don't like it, but political competition is a good thing. Incumbents usually outspend challengers by better than 3 to 1. Super PACs, which tend to support challengers, have nullified some of this advantage. ~ Bradley A. Smith

But the question is to find and rear leaders that are really one with the masses. This can only be accomplished by the masses, the political parties and the Trade Unions, by means of the most severe struggle, also inwardly. ~ Herman Gorter

A third emotional source of the defense forces is the sadistic conception of sexuality that the children of all patriarchal cultural circles acquire in early childhood. Since every inhibition of genital gratification intensifies the sadistic impulse, the entire sexual structure becomes sadistic. Since, moreover, genital claims are replaced by anal claims, the reactionary sexual slogan that a woman is degraded by sexual intercourse strikes a chord in the adolescent structure. In short, it is owing to the already existing perversity in the adolescent structure that the slogan can be effective. It is from his own personal experience that the adolescent has developed a sadistic conception of sexual intercourse. Thus, here too we find a confirmation of the fact that man's compulsive moralistic defense forces constitute the basis of political reaction's power. ~ Wilhelm Reich

As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as "anticlimax" began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words "The Personal is The Political." At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was - cliché is arguably forgiven here - very bad news. From now on it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic "preference," to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: "Speaking as a..." The could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old "hard" Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality pr pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when The Left lost - or I would prefer to say, discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The poor don't live in functional market economies as the rest of us do, but in political economies where corruption and broken systems extend from local government to moneylenders. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

When I began my work on how morality varies across the political spectrum, there was a partisan, manipulative element to it. I wanted to help the Democrats win. ~ Jonathan Haidt

America, like Britain before her, is now the great defender of the Status Quo. She has committed herself against revolution and radical change in the underdeveloped world because independent governments would destroy the world economic and political system, which assures the United States its disproportionate share of economic and political power ... America's preeminent wealth depends upon keeping things in the underdeveloped world much as they are, allowing change and modernization to proceed only in a controlled, orderly, and nonthreatening way. ~ Richard Barnet

Experience has taught me that any kind of political grouping is oppressive. It's the blind mass that crushes the individual. ~ Gao Xingjian

Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974. ~ Jose Saramago

I have a political attitude, but I'm certainly not a politician. ~ Kgalema Motlanthe

Sisters, brothers and the whities, Blacks and the crackers, Police and their backers, They're all political actors ~ Curtis Mayfield

I am very much afraid that the loss of Cyrenaica will have serious political consequences for the Duce. ~ Ugo Cavallero

Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right? So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves. ~ Amy Cuddy

Rebellions tend to be negative, to denounce and expose the enemy without providing a positive vision of a new future ... A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices, a revolution involves a projection of man/woman into the future ... It begins with projecting the notion of a more human human being, i.e. a human being who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only human beings have - creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

All my games were political games; I was, like Joan of Arc, perpetually being burned at the stake. ~ Indira Gandhi

I believe we need wilderness in order to be more complete human beings, to not be fearful of the animals that we are, an animal who bows to the incomparable power of natural forces when standing on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, an animal who understands a sense of humility when watching a grizzly overturn a stump with its front paw to forage for grubs in the lodgepole pines of the northern Rockies, an animal who weeps over the sheer beauty of migrating cranes above the Bosque del Apache in November, an animal who is not afraid to cry with delight in the middle of a midnight swim in a phospherescent tide, an animal who has not forgotten what it means to pray before the unfurled blossom of the sacred datura, remembering the source of all true visions.

As we step over the threshold of the twenty-first century, let us acknowledge that the preservation of wilderness is not so much a political process as a spiritual one, that the language of law and science used so successfully to define and defend what wilderness has been in the past century must now be fully joined with the language of the heart to illuminate what these lands mean to the future. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again. [Said to Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA) regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957] ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

President Obama has adopted a practice of picking and choosing which laws he wants to enforce. In most cases, his laws of choice conveniently coincide with his administration's political agenda. ~ Tom Rice

Micro-regulation is micro-tyranny, a slithering, serpentine network of insinuating Ceaucescu and Kim Jong-Il mini-me's. It's time for the mass rejection of their diktats. A political order that subjects you to the caprices of faceless bureaucrats or crusading "judges" merits no respect. To counter the Bureau of Compliance, we need an Alliance of Non-Compliance to help once free people roll back the regulatory state. ~ Mark Steyn

Whether I'll get the chance to write fiction, I don't know. I could do political conspiracy thrillers, couldn't I? With an investigative journalist as the heroine. ~ Heather Brooke

Any serious social, political, and economic change must include veganism. ~ Gary L. Francione

Any religious, philosophical or political idea that doesn't lead one towards love ought to be forsaken ~ Michael Gungor

But insecurity remains the hallmark of Pakistan's political and intellectual conversation. Even a comment about, say, Pakistan's relatively low ranking among nations for book readership, is portrayed as an attack on the idea of Pakistan. ~ Husain Haqqani

The political Greeders mindset wastes resources that could transform the future of tens of millions of people and the destinies of the countries.
We need to rethink Leadership and politics. ~ Tony Dovale

Citizenship in the 21st century requires more than paying your taxes and voting and occasionally running for office. That even if you're never in political office, you have political responsibilities. You can make your society stronger and better. ~ William J. Clinton

A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom. ~ Chris Hedges

To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning.
We have to 'read' what we feel and seem to see, and ask what those perceptions indicate and how we may take them into account without being overwhelmed by them. One issue relates to the reliability of our feelings and impressions. A sense of injustice could serve as a signal that moves us, but a signal does demand critical examination, and there has to be some scrutiny of the soundness of a
conclusion based mainly on signals...We also have to ask what kinds of reasoning should count in the assessment of ethical and political concepts such as justice and injustice. ~ Amartya Sen