Political Science Quotes

Politics doesn’t mean playing deceitful and trickery games against the people, it means playing resourceful and organized games for the people.

~ Amit Kalantri

If you believe in the eighteenth century view of the mind, you will look and act wimpy. You will think that all you need to do is give people the facts and the figures and they will reach the right conclusion. You will think that all you need to do is point out where their interests lie, and they will act politically to maximize them. You will believe in polling and focus groups: you will believe that if you ask people what their interests are, they will be aware of them and will tell you, and will vote on it. You will not have any need to appeal to emotion---indeed, to do so would be wrong! You will not have to speak of values; facts and figures will suffice. You will not have to change people's brains; their reason should be enough. You will not have to frame the facts; they will speak for themselves. You just have to get the facts to them...

~ George Lakoff

Politics is an alternative to war and if you're in it, you live it as such. You win some & you lose at times.

~ Mamur Mustapha

Business is boss, politics is servant.

~ Amit Kalantri

Now I would solicit the particular attention of those numerous people who imagine that money is everything in this world, and that rank and ability are inseparable from wealth: let them observe that Cincinnatus, the one man in whom Rome reposed all her hope of survival, was at that moment working a little three-acre farm (now known as Quinctian meadows) west of the Tiber, just opposite the spot where the shipyards are today. A mission from the city found him at work on his land - digging a ditch, maybe, or ploughing. Greetings were exchanged, and he was asked - with a prayer for God's blessing on himself and his country - to put on his toga and hear the Senate's instructions. This naturally surprised him, and, asking if all were well, he told his wife Racilia to run to their cottage and fetch his toga. The toga was brought, and wiping the grimy sweat from his hands and face he put it on; at once the envoys from the city saluted him, with congratulations, as Dictator, invited him to enter Rome, and informed him of the terrible danger of Minucius's army.

~ Livy

A sure way a country can develop is through a true development of the masses. Yes! A sure way to ensure a true freedom of the people is for the people take up their own destiny into their hands and bond their strengths to positively dare with a clear vision and fortitude like the eagle for a great change in wisdom and in peace, devoid of rebellious motive, massacre and nepotism, and with tenacity, direct the thought, policy and inspiration of the few people who rule the masses for the best change ever! Until this is done, the masses shall always cry out of ignorance, not knowing the real power within them and beg at the feet of the few people for how they should live their lives!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

...an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

​On top of the government-hierarchy you need an unpolluted group of scientists to give a nation the best direction.

~ Abhijit Naskar

By making the government a combination of elected officials and citizen-backed initiatives and referenda, there can truly be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

~ Victoria Stoklasa

If you have the right to influence the laws that are made in your community, why not take the opportunity to do something good?

~ Victoria Stoklasa

In any event, we must remember that it's not the blinded wrongdoers who are primarily responsible for the triumph of evil in the world, but the spiritually sighted servants of the good.

~ Fyodor Stepun

Political scientists and professors are the new clergy, the clergy of oppression.

~ A.e. Samaan

...the freedom to bear arms may be righteously rejected to encourage the preservation of all corporeal forms of life.

~ Kevin Alan Lee

. . . Kings, aristocrats, tyrants, whoever they be, are slaves rebelling against the sovereign of the earth, which is the human race, and against the legislator of the universe, which is n

~ Maximilien De Robespierre

The political reputation of Servius rests upon his organization of society according to a fixed scale of rank and fortune. He originated the census, a measure of the highest utility to a state destined, as Rome was, to future preeminence; for by means of its public service, in peace as well as in war, could thence forward be regularly organized on the basis of property; every man's contribution could be in proportion to his means.

~ Livy

Believing, as they now did, that the heavenly powers took part in human affairs, they became so much absorbed in the cultivation of religion and so deeply imbued with the sense of their religious duties, that the sanctity of an oath had more power to control their lives than the fear of punishment for lawbreaking.

~ Livy

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.

~ Thomas L. Friedman

If either one or two candidates is dominating the field at the time of the first primaries and caucuses, the voters are superfluous because the victor is already guaranteed. If, however, no candidate is dominant, then the primaries and caucuses will determine the winner. Nonetheless, in recent campaign cycles, that determination has been made earlier and earlier in the process, by fewer and fewer voters, who pick from only a few candidates - the ones who have not already eliminated themselves from serious contention by their weak performances in the pre-primary phase.

~ Roger Lawrence Butler

On paper, the people now choose the party nominees for president. And yet, the process seems to have come full circle. [back to party bosses choosing] Voters theoretically get to pick the candidates, but in practice they rarely get the opportunity. In most cases, the contest is over in a few weeks after a burst of activity in a handful of states. How did the reform movement [late 60s, early 70s] get so far away from the plan? The answer is that there was no single plan, nor a single entity hat could craft a system to meet the original intent of the reformers. [To democratize the process]

~ Roger Lawrence Butler

I am a patriot. I have always sought to serve my country, in theory a Republic. Learning that secrecy was evil rather than good was my first step. From there it was a steady march toward open-source everything. Now I see all the evil that secrecy enables in a corrupt Congress, a corrupt Executive, a corrupt economy, and a corrupt society. I see that the greatest service I or any other person can render to the Republic is to march firmly, non-violently, toward open-source everything.

~ Robert David Steele

In order for us to live within this finely balanced constellation of complex systems, in order for the Earth to show resilience and last for centuries into the future as an environment of human life, we have to embody three things: a respect for Earth systems and their details in balance; a commitment to discovering and sharing the truth and only the truth at all times about all things; and a commitment to doing no harm.

~ Robert David Steele

Our concept of truth becomes more universal as we reach higher levels of consciousness and awareness, taking in a wider spectrum of information and possibility. As we adapt a more expanded perspective on our reality, our concept of what is true and meaningful changes--from local to regional, regional to global, beyond global to the galaxy, and then to the cosmos.

~ Robert David Steele

When we relate and share knowledge authentically, this places us in a state of grace, a state of 'win-win' harmony with all others, and establishes trust among all.

~ Robert David Steele

Put in the bluntest possible terms, what I discovered was that the U.S. secret intelligence community was collecting only information it considered secret, while ignoring the eighty to ninety percent of the information in the world, in all languages, that was not secret.

~ Robert David Steele

The bottom line is that our government is not intelligent about how it pursues the public interest, because its decisions are not informed decisions (and its interest is generally not the public's).

~ Robert David Steele

I am personally optimistic. I share the widespread view that we are entering a new epoch during which we can achieve conscious evolution and the elevation of humanity to a constructive steward of the Earth.

~ Robert David Steele

There is nothing wrong with the United States--or the world at large--that cannot be stabilized and reconstructed by restoring the intelligence and integrity of all our organizations across the eight communities (academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, non-governmental/non-profit).

~ Robert David Steele

Integrity, in my view, starts with the individual human being and grows in a compounded manner from there. The citizen must be an 'intelligence minuteman.

~ Robert David Steele

Complexity demands resilience, and that's what panarchy offers. Resilience in the face of complexity is a challenge even when you apply rigorous intelligence and integrity to develop a coherent and flexible strategy.

~ Robert David Steele

As our technological capacities continue to increase and our environment becomes ever more fragile and endangered, we find that changes to the Earth that used to take ten thousand years now take a fraction of that.

~ Robert David Steele

This lack of accurate, trustworthy information about the true cost of any given policy, product, service, or behavior is paralyzing all action.

~ Robert David Steele

No one wants to be poor. In my view, and the view of many authors who have focused on poverty and practical solutions to it, we need to move beyond the industrial-era paradigm of giving them fish, or even the information-era paradigm of teaching them how to fish, and instead move closer to the cosmic paradigm of giving them the tools with which to create their own ingenious means of addressing their problems in their cultural context and their time, while drawing--at their convenience, not ours--on our dispersed knowledge.

~ Robert David Steele

Open Everything' is everything--it is our mind, our heart, our soul, our destiny.

~ Robert David Steele

We all know that 97% of the money in the world doesn't exist and that's thanks to Fractional Reserve Banking, or should I say fictional reserve banking. He grinned at his own joke, his smile partly hidden by his hair, Money is no longer attached to the Gold Standard, therefore, it isn't based on anything. So when it says, 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand ten pounds,' I have to ask, ten pounds of what? Silence. The world is owned by the rich shareholder, the rich superstar, the rich industrialist, the rich aristocracy. He was now marching around the stage, It doesn't matter who or what they are, if they're rich then they own a part of the world, but they only own it because they've got lots of money. Which means they own part of the 97% of the world’s fictional money, the pretend money that only exists on a computer. He stopped abruptly and stared out at the audience, Which means that if they cashed in their fictional nonexistent money they'd get something like this ten pound note offering to pay the bearer the sum of ten pounds of nothing. He held the note aloft, Which means the rich have managed to buy the entire world with paper nothing that has a value of nothing and we've let them do it.

~ Arun D. Ellis

Chinese commentaries stress the opportunity that the investments and aid they offer presents to developing countries to avoid the hazards of reliance on Western dominated financial institutions: austerity programs that call for severe cuts in state-subsidized social welfare, deregulation of state-owned facilities, trade liberalization, and an open door for multinational corporation investment.

~ Melvin Gurtov

The advertising industry's prime task is to ensure that uninformed consumers make irrational choices, thus undermining market theories that are based on just the opposite.

~ Noam Chomsky

We are all born to love people and use things. Unfortunately, we grow to love things and use people...

~ T. Rafael Cimino

There is room for words on subjects other than last words.

~ Robert Nozick

Very few of the common people realize that the political and legal systems have been corrupted by decades of corporate lobbying.

~ Steven Magee

At last he was to feel that he had the town, as it were, in his pocket, and was ready for anything. Accordingly he sent a confidential messenger to Rome, to ask his father what step he should next take, his power in Gabii being, by God's grace, by this time absolute. Tarquin, I suppose, was not sure of the messenger's good faith: in any case, he said not a word in reply to his question, but with a thoughtful air went out to the garden. The man followed him, and Tarquin, strolling up and down in silence, began knocking off poppy-heads with his stick. The messenger at last wearied of putting his question and waiting for the reply, so he returned to Gabii supposing his mission to have failed. He told Sextus what he had said and what he had seen his father do: the king, he declared, whether from anger, or hatred, or natural arrogance, had not uttered a single word. Sextus realized that though his father had not spoken, he had, by his action, indirectly expressed his meaning clearly enough; so he proceeded at once to act upon his murderous instructions.

~ Livy