Politics Quotes

I have not encouraged talk about man’s holy privacy, although I do respect and defend man’s right to have it.

~ Mie Hansson

...in the running of cities, virtually nothing is done by anyone that is conducive to political health, nor is there a single ally with whom one might go to the aid of justice and still remain alive; it would be a case of a solitary human among wild animals, neither wanting to join in their depredations nor able to stand alone against their collective savagery, dead before he'd done any good to his city or friends and useless both to himself and everybody else. Once a person has made all these calculations, he keeps his peace and minds his own business, like someone withdrawing from the prevailing wind into the shelter of a wall in a storm of dust or rain, and as he sees everyone else filling themselves full of lawlessness he is content if he himself can somehow live out life here untainted by injustice and impious actions, and leave it with fine hopes and in a spirit of kindness and good will.

~ Plato

For if our bodies aren’t our own,And justice isn’t ours,And our love is just a sin,And voices by the peopleAre no longer for the people,What have we left to lose?

~ Phar West Nagle

As things stand the intellectuals only come out to lick the bones left over by the tyrant.

~ Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for us to change the mindset which has tended to create ad hoc solutions for the political madness and social farce. In fact, our age of tragedy which has been represented by the so-called “Marxists” in the Sinhalese community and “liberalists” in Tamil community since the 70s to the late 90s, has been replaced by the age of farce.

~ Nilantha Ilangamuwa

The tyrant has power to play as long as he is the master in his surroundings.

~ Nilantha Ilangamuwa

In this miasma of forgotten wars, torture and the war on terror, there are no easy answers, especially in the face of a very real terrorism. But I can live my questions. As a humanitarian, I can act from a feeling of shared vulnerability with the victims of preventable suffering. I have a responsibility to bear witness publicly to the plight of those I seek to assist and to insist on independent humanitarian action and respect for international humanitarian law. As a citizen, I can assume my responsibility for the public world - the world of politics - not as a spectator, but as a participant who engages and shapes it. The larger force that can push back against the wrong use of power can be the force of a citizen's politics that openly debates the right use of power and the reasoned pursuit of justice. Catherine Lu, a political philosopher and my friend, has described justice as a boundary over which we must not go, a bond of common humanity between us, a balance among people of equal worth and dignity. I fight not for a utopian ideal, but each day I make a choice, against nihilism and towards justice.

~ James Orbinski

I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can't imagine someone else's point of view.

~ Sonia Sotomayor

A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughing-stock of the world.

~ Henry David Thoreau

If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community.'A polis is not an association for residence on a common site, or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange.' While these conditions are necessary to a polis, they are not sufficient. 'The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end.

~ Michael J. Sandel

It is not unpatriotic to acknowledge America’s faults. No country is perfect… We can’t reach the top of the mountain if we don’t fix the injustice and confront our lies.

~ Keith Ellison

For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.

~ Jürgen Habermas

The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.

~ Socrates

If a theory of justice is to guide reasoned choice of policies, strategies or institutions, then the identification of fully just social arrangements is neither necessary nor sufficient.

~ Amartya Sen

Nobody is sure of his life, property and health when the parliament deliberates.

~ Janusz Korwin-Mikke

Many people tell me that I should become a politician but I tell them no I want to do something good for the nation.

~ Amit Abraham

Having the liberty to have freedom of choice is the greatest thing that each and everyone of us has because that makes us who we are. Do not however use this as an excuse to discriminate, segregate and stereotype mass amounts of people on the basis of a small group of individuals who have either the power or the spotlight to do bad things

~ Calum Alexander Logan

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.

~ William Kennedy

Those who would legislate against the teaching of evolution should also legislate against gravity, electricity and the unreasonable velocity of light, and also should introduce a clause to prevent the use of the telescope, the microscope and the spectroscope or any other instrument of precision which may in the future be invented, constructed or used for the discovery of truth.

~ Luther Burbank

New Rule: You don't have to teach both sides of a debate if one side is a load of crap. President Bush recently suggested that public schools should teach intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution, because after all, evolution is just a theory. Then the president renewed his vow to drive the terrorists straight over the edge of the e

~ Bill Maher

The immortality of Thomas Jefferson does not lie in any one of his achievements, or in the series of his achievements, but in his attitude towards mankind and the conception which he sought to realize in action of the service owed by America to the rest of the world...Thomas Jefferson was a great leader of men because he understood and interpreted the spirits of men.

~ Woodrow Wilson

Why is it that we are happy to see change of system happening in movies but, when it comes to real life, we are afraid of it. Are we a Box Office Democracy?

~ Sukant Ratnakar

Propaganda is what gives us the freedom to do as we are told.

~ Markus W. Lunner

I'd used people's stories and their lives to bolster my political arguments for changing welfare. Now, however, I was running into the people themselves, and I realized that using anyone's tragedy for political gain was cowardly.

~ David Kuo

I've dropped my pebble in the ocean, and hopefully; throughout the course of the day; millions of others will drop theirs in too. No single one of us knows which pebble causes the wave to crest, but each of us, quite rightly, believes that it might be ours; an act of faith.

~ Michael J. Fox

The American political experience can therefore be viewed as optimism in the collective.

~ Michael J. Fox

We put up a kind of spiritual firewall and make a conscious effort to shut out the headlines, because our (Bible) discussions are meant to be timeless.

~ John Kasich

There were always people who struggled their way to the top of the heap, no matter how much that heap looked like garbage when seen from the outside.

~ Michelle Sagara West

No ideology is worth a Human life.

~ Adriano Bulla

Hmmm.. We are like children in a bus with faulty brakes on a hill, eventually we will meet our collusion point. Well blindly some of us may think of sacking out all the good out of the bus before it meets it's end, but what is really there to sack out. Some places are hard to to get out of.

~ Allan Amanyire

All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand--his own part comic, part tragic, part cussed, but part glorious nature.

~ Robert S. Mcnamara

It is very good, Wisehammer, it's very well written, but it's too-too-political. It will be considered provocative.You don't want me to say it.Not tonight. We have many people against us.I could tone it down. I could omit 'We left our country for our country's good.'That's the best line.

~ Timberlake Wertenbaker

Politics is applied anywhere, even in heaven.

~ Toba Beta

Cynicism is extremely contagious, and the most pious among us cannot long endure its potency. The gullible should be on their guard, however, since this endearing quality frequently masquerades as wit.

~ Mike Corbett

No quality imparts apparent strength to its possessors more effectively than faith. From hospital beds to battlefields, it is the iron that strengthens a man to confront his destiny.

~ Mike Corbett

Look at yourselves. Some of you teenagers, students. How do you think I feel and I belong to a generation ahead of you - how do you think I feel to have to tell you, 'We, my generation, sat around like a knot on a wall while the whole world was fighting for its human rights - and you've got to be born into a society where you still have that same fight.' What did we do, who preceded you? I'll tell you what we did. Nothing. And don't you make the same mistake we made....

~ Malcolm X

It's sad that several political parties still count the dead, the starving, the unemployed by their religion, caste, creed and sect. The young generation needs to engage in politics of right vs wrong and not right vs left.

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

Politicians would be well advised not to hold their breath for youth to engage in politics any time soon. Today’s youth are the first generation to have realized for real change to occur, it must happen on an individual level rather than at an administrative level.

~ James Morcan

(A Free Market in Education: The Answer to Prayer, And Other Issues)No matter where you are on the issue, there is no solution to it within a government school context, only perpetual conflict. The answer involves choice, competition and private alternatives. If you don't like what a business offers, you don't argue endlessly about it; you walk across the street. Why is this principle so complicated for some people?

~ Lawrence W. Reed

The people who believe themselves superior to you will reveal themselves in how they respond to criticism from you. An opinion of anyone carries as much weight as whatever value that person's social currency has. A poor man spouting words more thought provoking than plato would not be credit for his prudence for his social currency and not his wisdom decides the value of his life.

~ Crystal Evans