Quotessence
Home / Topics / Political Quotes

Political Quotes

Browse 12684 quotes about Political.

Related topics

Political Quotes

“Washington's answer to a self-inflicted financial crisis reminded Americans why they so deeply distrust the political class. The 'fiscal cliff' process was secretive and sloppy, and the nation's so-called leadership lacked the political courage to address our root problems: joblessness and debt.”

“The free-trade idea, logically applied, will abolish usury; and with usury will disappear the chief bone of contention between labor and capital. But, just at this point, free-traders go over to the enemy; and many writers on political economy, in flat contradiction of the essential principles of that science, have made elaborate arguments to prove self-government in finance, impossible! What shall we think of men who, having dethroned kings, demolished popes, destroyed slave oligarchies and assailed tariff monopoly, advise submission to the most oppressive and dishonest of despotisms, Usury?”

“If anyone feels offended by my words, I would respond that I speak them with affection and with the best of intentions, quite apart from any personal interest or political ideology. My words are not those of a foe or an opponent. I am interested only in helping those who are in thrall to an individualistic, indifferent and self-centred mentality to be freed from those unworthy chains and to attain a way of living and thinking which is more humane, noble and fruitful, and which will bring dignity to their presence on this earth.”

“No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave.”

“Never will we be able to understand our times if we naively 'think' of this system of self Government as the work of a few gangsters or the creation of a pack of criminals we call a political party. The appeal of Socialism, Fascism and communism was principally negative; they were protests against a live and let live anything goes liberalism, a spineless indifference to causes, a failure to recognize that nothing was evil enough to hate, and nothing was good enough to die for.”

“We have evidence all around us in our daily analytic practice and in contemporary world history that this earth-shaking archetypal event is taking place here and now. It has already started. It is manifesting itself in international relations; in the breakdown of the social structures of Western civilization; in political, ethnic, and religious groupings; as well as within the psyches of individuals- the momentous event of the coming of the self into conscious realization.”

“The UN should arrange, as US forces leave, for an international group of peacekeepers and negotiators from the Arab countries to bring together Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and work out a solution for self-governance that would give all three groups a share in political power. Simultaneously, the UN should arrange for shipments of food and medicine, from the United States and other countries, as well as engineers to help rebuild the country.”

“Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience - a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth.”

“In the background lurks the scourge of international terrorism. There are people exercising power in a few countries and leading political factions in others who seem to be moved by narrow, brutal and irrational impulses. Their view of their own self-interest is so blinkered as to leave no space for purely human values, for peaceful negotiation or for economic advancement. They are bent on the destruction of the established order and of civilised ways of doing business. They must never be allowed to succeed.”

“Yet we slink about like whipped curs:;... our self-abasement principally takes the form of subservience to the United States:;... we are under no necessity to participate in the American nightmare of a Soviet monster barely held at bay in all quarters of the globe by an inconceivable nuclear armament and by political intervention everywhere from Poland to Cambodia. It is the Americans who need us in order to act out their crazy scenario... We simply do not need to go chasing up and down after the vagaries of the next ignoramus to become President of the United States.”

“Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.”

“Anarchism is in reality the ideal of political and social science, and also the ideal of religion. It is the ideal to which Jesus Christ looked forward. Christ founded no church, established no state, gave practically no laws, organized no government and set up no external authority, but he did seek to write on the hearts of men God's law and make them self-legislating.”

“Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals. We look away from government for relief, because we know that force (legalized) invades the personal liberty of man, seizes upon the natural elements and intervenes between man and natural laws; from this exercise of force through governments flows nearly all the misery, poverty, crime and confusion existing in society.”

“Stirner's political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given. ... Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual's action. ... The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act.”

“Political and social justice requires, not the disintegration of a country and destruction or humiliation of a class which shows initiative, intelligence and drive, but equality of opportunity for all, genuine freedom for self-fulfilment, in which all men irrespective of caste or creed may share.”

“Canada may be fast-forwarding, jump starting, into a new pattern, a model of communication linkages, a civilization that is more than a grab for power and dominance, a place that could channel the fires of the global wirings, where political alliances are subject to electrical ebb and flow, and the alchemical cultivations of imagination and perception, of the self, could precail of the ideology of capital.”

“Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed. And since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people of the country. The truth of this insight is immediately apparent.”

“Self-righteousness and presumptive moral judgments pose a great danger in the political arena. To become convinced of the divine infallibility of one's personal predilections on a secular political issue is to play God, to assume to oneself the attributes of deity. It cultivates an arrogant intolerance of dissenting viewpoints and relegates one's political adversaries to the category of evil per se.”

“In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself.”

“Self-censorship as a result of intimidation or social pressures, sometimes referred to as "political correctness", constitutes a serious obstacle to the proper functioning of democracy. It is important to hear the views of all persons,including the "silent majority", and to give heed to the weaker voices.”

“Love or affection towards an individual or nation, is indicated by good action snot merely be words. The adoration towards nation is expressed by works of welfare equally done by the ruler and theruled. The ruler himself must be engatged, in welfare of th country and also should select officials examining their involvement with the public god. Self-centered people greedy of the power should be kept away”

“Immigrants bring to America the values of faith in God, love of family, hard work and self reliance - the values that made us a great nation to begin with. We've all seen those values in action, through the service and sacrifice of more than 35,000 foreign-born men and women currently on active duty in the United States military.”

“Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation.”

“There is a reason why conservatives talk about 'government' and not 'self-government,' because to refer to the latter is to concede that 'the government' is really the most basic product of our political commonwealth, that it is what we produce among ourselves so as to order the production of everything else that we do together.”

“I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.”

“The concept of emotional or spiritual survival has an honorable history, but it does invite self-indulgence. In my own case, the worst I ever survived was severe personal and political confusion, the temptation to various sorts of craziness and a couple of bad acid trips. It felt pretty horrendous at the time, and some of it was even dangerous, but Auschwitz it wasn't.”