Politics Quotes

Politics means implementation of the best ideas for the society in the path of wellbeing and progress.

~ Abhijit Naskar

As neoliberalism wages war on public goods and the very idea of a public, including citizenship beyond membership, it dramatically thins public life without killing politics. Struggles remain over power, hegemonic values, resources, and future trajectories. This persistence of politics amid the destruction of public life and especially educated public life, combined with the marketization of the political sphere, is part of what makes contemporary politics peculiarly unappealing and toxic— full of ranting and posturing, emptied of intellectual seriousness, pandering to an uneducated and manipulable electorate and a celebrity-and-scandal-hungry corporate media. Neoliberalism generates a condition of politics absent democratic institutions that would support a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best: informed passion, respectful deliberation, aspirational sovereignty, sharp containment of powers that would overrule or undermine it.

~ Wendy Brown

You are looking at this wrong. You think I hold my territory by the might of my fist. But that's not it. I hold my territory by consent of the governed. I think it is a very American concept, which might be why you never looked for it. — Adam Hauptman, Columbia Basin Pack Alpha, to Iacopo (Jacob) Bonarata, Lord of the Night (master vampire of Milan)

~ Patricia Briggs

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility: he can never admit an error.....The propaganda effect of infallibility, the striking success of posing as a mere interpreting agent of predictable forces, has encouraged in totalitarian dictators the habit of announcing their political intentions in the form of prophecy....Mass leaders in power have one concern wich overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.

~ Hannah Arendt

Whoever wants to hide a big scandal is best to stage a small one

~ Friedrich Dürrenmatt

[Voltaire] theoretically prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if they do not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity; it is suited only to small states protected by geographic situation, and as yet unspoiled and untorn with wealth; in general men are rarely worthy to govern themselves. Republics are transient at best; they are the first form of society, arising from the union of families; the American Indians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracies. but differentiation of economic status puts an end to these egalitarian governments; and differentiation is the inevitable accompaniment of development.

~ Will Durant

there is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.

~ Hannah Arendt

You know what politique is? It is the French word for a lie. Kdoub! Politique! When you hear the French say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. And when you hear the Moslems, the Friends of Independence, say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. All lies are sins. And so, which displeases Allah more, a lie told by a Nazarene, who doesn’t know the true faith from the false, or a lie told by a Moslem, who does?

~ Paul Bowles

You know,' Russell said, 'we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon Johnson.' There was a pause. A man was perhaps contemplating the end of a way of life he cherished. He was perhaps contemplating the fact that he had played a large role - perhaps the largest role - in raising to power the man who was going to end that way of life. But when, a moment later, Richard Russell spoke again, it was only to repeat the remark. 'We could have beaten Kennedy on civil rights, but we can't Lyndon.

~ Robert A. Caro

I am here not to save money but to make more of it to empower the people and make the world a better place.

~ Saminu Kanti

No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable future; when members of the House of Representatives gave their Speaker, Sam Rayburn, ruler of the House for more than two decades, a limousine as a present, attached to the back of the front seat was a plaque that read 'To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn - Who Would Have Been President If He Had Come From Any Place but the South.

~ Robert A. Caro

The “social justice” movement is not at all about social justice, but about relentlessly bullying anyone who does not subscribe to their Stalinist ideology.

~ Joshua Goldberg

Any man who neglects his conscience is a dangerous animal.

~ Suzy Kassem

You would think having your arse constantly kissed would be enjoyable, even just a little. But when it’s a nest of snakes trying to latch on—offering a rim job with their flicking, forked tongues—it’s revolting.

~ Emma Chase

...this is how politics is played. With fakery and false smiles and butcher knives to the back.

~ Emma Chase

We have always trusted the control of our doomsday devices to the “key” elected of our nations.The current “interests” reorganizing the world now transcend the interests of nations.So these weapons will only be launched to serve interests other than that of the nations that launch them,Hence the “key” elected…

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

It is going to be too easy for things to start feeling normal—especially if you are someone who is not directly impacted by his actions. So keep reminding yourself:This is not normal.Write it on a Post-It note and stick it on your refrigerator, hire a skywriter once a month, tattoo it on your ass.Because a Klan-backed misogynist internet troll is going to be delivering the next State of the Union address.And that is not normal.It is fucked up.

~ John Oliver

Silence is the most expensive to buy.

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Florence, listen to me carefully. He squeezed her hand. Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place

~ Sana Krasikov

From the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made itself blind to the death and destruction of the past

~ Sana Krasikov

Their courtship unfolded in two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories

~ Sana Krasikov

Was it an instinct towards their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her mind’s eye, was an image of the two of them dancing on the edge of the world, not realising that they were about to fall off

~ Sana Krasikov

Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he’d stood before, but the caramel color of his coat was unmistakable. He was loitering in front of what looked like a Ford V8 parked nose-up on the sidewalk. Florence adjusted her shawl over her shoulders and crossed to the opposite corner of the plaza. When she turned back to look again, he was gone

~ Sana Krasikov

The Bolshevik leaders perched atop the Mausoleum were no easier to tell apart than chess pawns. But Florence too was certain that she could recognise the twinkling eyes of Joseph Stalin, which looked down at her each workday from the oil painting above Timofeyev’s desk

~ Sana Krasikov

Sunset was just then settling over Red Square. There seemed some hidden vision to be gleaned. A message about man’s chaotic spirit and his sombre dignity. His dignity and his power. His power and his purpose. She was sure that there was some thread there, but the burden of decoding it made her feel too tired

~ Sana Krasikov

Moscow appeared to her as an Asiatic sprawl of twisting streets, wooden shanties, and horse cabs. But already another Moscow was rising up through the chaos of the first. Streets built to accommodate donkey tracks have been torn open and replaced with boulevards broader than two or three Park Avenues. On the sidewalks, pedestrians were being detoured onto planks around enormous construction pits. A smell of sawdust and metal filings hung in the air

~ Sana Krasikov

Sergey described the mighty furnaces and plants rising up from the steppes. “How far we’ve come. How much work there is still to do!” She would have to see it herself one day, with her own eyes. Florence reread the last line with a turbulent flip in her stomach. Was this an invitation?

~ Sana Krasikov

Our communists aren’t like your communists. In New York they’re always on the street demonstrating, but their demands are absurd. Slash rents! Free groceries and electricity for the poor! They demand that landlords open up their vacant apartments to house the unemployed. They even demand that the Communist Party distribute unemployment relief instead of the Labor Department. They might as well demand cake and champagne!

~ Sana Krasikov

An independent newspaper? It is a newspaper that looks nothing like a newspaper.

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Misfortune never comes singly. It's surrounded by bodyguards.

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but incompatible traits.

~ David Brooks

First —we should restrain our anti-colonialist joy here— the question to be raised is: if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing its hegemony? The answer is: 'capitalism with Asian values' (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything to do with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism as such to suspend democracy). From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply 'progressist'. It was always obsessed by the question: what is the price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed; it was just that he insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms. And we should do the same with the progress of global capitalism today: keep in view its dark underside, which is fomenting revolts.What all this implies is that today's conservatives are not really conservative. While fully endorsing capitalism's continuous self-revolutionizing, they just want to make it more efficient by supplementing it with some traditional institutions (religion, for instance) to constrain its destructive consequences for social life and to maintain social cohesion. Today, a true conservative is the one who fully admits the antagonisms and deadlocks of global capitalisms, the one who rejects simple progressivism, and who is attentive to the dark obverse of progress. In this sense, only a radical Leftist can be today a true conservative.

~ Slavoj Žižek

Each thinking mind is a political mind

~ Zaman Ali

Blind party loyalty will be our downfall. We must follow the truth wherever it leads.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Democracy is a continuous, open process of civility.A democracy can never be “done”; updating democracy can never be over.Democracy can be nothing else but a continuous process, because we use it to organize our life, and life is nothing but a continuous process.Democracy can be compared to an operating system or an anti-virus software; if it does not get perpetually updated, it becomes obsolete very fast.Trusting the updates or the “improvements” of democracy to the elected and the owned mass media is like trusting the updates of an anti-virus program to virus creators; it defeats the purpose of updates or improvements.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.

~ Harry G. Frankfurt

Sociopaths are attracted to politics because the see it as a sphere in which you can be ruthless and step all over people. That fact that some politicians can tell such awful lies is another example of sociopathy. Sociopaths lie—they see nothing wrong with it.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

One cannot enter a State legislature or a prison for felons without becoming, in some measure, a dubious character.

~ H.l. Mencken

Help yourself with the state! It's on democracy!

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Utopia's value lies not in its relation to present practice but in its relation to a possible future. Its practical use is to overstep the immediate reality to depict a condition whose clear desirability draws us on, like a magnet.

~ Krishan Kumar