Top 100 Political Action Quotes
#1. The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct. The artist especially must remain free from all outer restraints.
Hans Hartung
#2. There is a weapon we can fight with. That is the weapon of political action.
Harry Bridges
#3. Power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money.
Hannah Arendt
#5. The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.
Max Weber
#6. The tragedy of all political action is that some problems have no solution; none of the alternatives are intellectually consistent or morally uncompromising; and whatever decision is taken will harm somebody.
James Joll
#7. One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.
Paulo Freire
#8. When these political action committees give money, they expect something in return other than good government.
Bob Dole
#9. Moreover, the church might be obliged to not only "bind up the wounds of those who have fallen beneath the wheel . . . but at times halt the wheel itself" by taking direct political action.
Anonymous
#10. All of us can make changes, but the changes that are most needed are not light bulbs and windows but laws and policies and treaties. So, yes, we are in a phase of this (climate protection) struggle where civic and political action is at the top of the list.
Al Gore
#11. I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.
Terry Tempest Williams
#12. interests of mankind as a whole, but they do not suffice to determine political action. Perhaps they will do so at
Anonymous
#13. The first rule of good theatre is 'Show, don't tell.' It applies to good political action as well.
Carne Ross
#14. Religious conservatives still lack a theology of direct political action.
Ralph E. Reed Jr.
#15. And sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action.
Ralph Ellison
#16. All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.
Leo Strauss
#17. Irresponsibility, cowardice, personal vanity, whining and chaos are becoming the maxims of political action. There is a stink in Berlin - a huge one!
Edmund Stoiber
#18. Only armchair politicians are immune from committing mistakes. Errors are inherent in political action.
Nelson Mandela
#19. TV-based politics is to political action as watching ER is to saving someone in distress.
Robert D. Putnam
#20. Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation - as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed.
P. J. O'Rourke
#21. Political action is the highest responsibility of a citizen.
John F. Kennedy
#22. What I say is, that the real non-resistants can believe in direct action only, never in political action. For the basis of all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through.
Voltairine De Cleyre
#23. This weekend the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, featured several speakers including Sarah Palin and Phil Robertson from 'Duck Dynasty.' It was a good weekend for conservatives - and a great weekend for wild animals.
Jimmy Fallon
#24. Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity.
Tom Robbins
#25. Boycott is a widely understood form of social, economic, and political action.
Steve Crawshaw
#26. ....Environmentalists try to preserve these ecosystems through political action. Yet no law will succeed in preserving something that people know only from a distance or do not understand at close range.
Richard Rabkin
#27. If one sets a car on fire, that is a criminal offence. If one sets hundreds of cars on fire, that is political action.
Ulrike Meinhof
#28. A political action committee trying to raise money for a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign is selling "Ready for Hillary" champagne glasses and Christmas ornaments. Because if one thing improves the holidays, it's drinking mixed with politics.
Jimmy Fallon
#29. If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible.
David Harvey
#30. Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
Michel Foucault
#31. My films can be considered political action against the tyranny of good taste.
John Waters
#32. If you take Darwinian theory, make a 'scientific' principle out of it, put it into political action, then you have something like Nazi Germany.
Bruce Lipton
#33. I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Tony Judt
#35. The real focus needs to be on political action to stop this runaway train, real soon.
William H. Calvin
#36. Each of us should choose which course of action we must take; education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes, but let it not be said that we did nothing.
Ron Paul
#37. The essential thing is the formation of the political will of the nation: that is the starting point for political action.
Adolf Hitler
#38. I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they're participating in some meaningful political action.
Howard Rheingold
#39. Middle-class societies don't emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be CREATED through political action.
Paul Krugman
#40. When the goal of political action is no longer the defense of liberty, no word other than demagoguery can describe the despicable nature of politics.
Ron Paul
#41. What is music in America? It's this stand-in for political action in a lot of senses. We have no democracy and we have no art culture, and we've long considered politics nebbish-y and hopelessly unsexy. So a lot of what would be considered political activism is channeled into cultural work.
Ian Svenonius
#42. Geopolitical and demographic forces are so rooted in the unchangeable that political action often generates little but noise.
Peter Zeihan
#43. In insisting that personal habit and political action be one and the same, absolutist moralizing limits the possibilities of both.
Heather Paxson
#44. Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.
Michael Joseph Oakeshott
#45. If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#46. Venezuelans have a long history. So we are able to listen to each other, to talk to each other. From here were born the liberators of the region, and they said before and after that process we have a culture of political action. We are not in despair. That's the image broadcast to abroad.
Nicolas Maduro
#47. Political action means taking on responsibility. This cannot happen without power. Power is to serve responsibility.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#48. Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
Honore De Balzac
#49. The starship thing is really political action and reaction, the natural outgrowth of Volunteers.
Paul Kantner
#50. Like art, political action gives shape and expression to the things we fear as well as to those we desire. It is a creative process, drawing on the power to imagine as well as to act.
Madeleine M. Kunin
#51. The pursuit of truth, as a form of political action, is inherently disruptive, anti-authoritarian, and dangerous to those content with the way things are.
Nancy Snow
#52. The erasure itself became the action. It seemed to suggest a moment in terms of how sad or pessimistic you can feel in a political environment or a historical situation. But it felt like a really hopeful gesture in the painting.
Julie Mehretu
#53. Affirmative action works but we're going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place.
Harold Washington
#54. I don't care what Einstein said about God not playing dice; If he exists, he's addicted to craps.
Henry Mosquera
#55. The Night Manager doesn't exist in the post-Cold war universe, it exists much more in the modern world, I think. There is more action. The bad guys don't have particularly political or national-political affiliations.
Tom Hiddleston
#56. Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.
Hannah Arendt
#57. Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.
Noam Chomsky
#58. We must let the world know children's stories and we must take effective protective, legal and political actions to ensure that as many children as possible are spared the brutalities of war. Our joint action has, and will, make a difference, if only we make the effort.
Radhika Coomaraswamy
#59. A bright man of conviction and action is a beacon to his country,
but a flash light to the scurrying of inaction, ego, and insecurity of lesser men.
Daniel S. Green
#60. Bond is the longest-running franchise ever and there's a reason for that: they are action movies but they are also touched by current events without being political or too serious.
Javier Bardem
#61. Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.
Saul D. Alinsky
#62. The measure of the wealth of a nation is indicated by the measure of its protection of its industry; the measure of the poverty of a nation is marked by the degree in which it neglects and abandons the care of its own industry, leaving it exposed to the action of foreign powers.
Henry Clay
#63. Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
Marshall McLuhan
#64. If there is a silver lining in the action of MSNBC against Keith Olbermann, it is that people will now pay more attention to the political role of corporate media in America.
Bernie Sanders
#65. Churchill used words for different purposes: to argue for moral and political causes, to advocate courses of action in the social, national and international spheres, and to tell the story of his own life and that of Britain and its place in the world.
Winston S. Churchill
#66. Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.
James F. Cooper
#67. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Gore Vidal
#68. When people align around shared political, social, economic or environmental values, and take collective action, thinking and behavior that compromises the lives of millions of people around the world can truly change.
Simon Mainwaring
#69. Not acting is a policy. Not acting is a choice. Not acting brings its own consequences and you have to weight cost of action against cost of inaction. And for many people across the political spectrum the cost of inaction is rising too high.
Liam Fox
#70. No real social change has ever been
brought about without a revolution -
Revolution is but thought carried into action.
Every effort for progress, for enlightenment,
for science, for religious, political, and
economic liberty, emanates from the minority,
and not from the mass.
Emma Goldman
#71. People are angry that things as common sense as securing the border and eliminating sanctuary cities are being framed as extreme views. They are tired of empty rhetoric without action, and they are hungry for a leader from outside the professional political class.
Carly Fiorina
#72. THE ABULON DANCE is an intricate and fast-paced novel of political intrigue and clashing alien cultures. The characterizations are rich, detailed, and subtle, the action engrossing. I finished it in a single sitting.
Robin Wayne Bailey
#73. If you truly care about animal rights and have a passion for it, take some action. Whether it's hands-on or political, just go for it. No matter what path you choose in life or what you decide to do, you can use your voice to educate other people and help the cause.
Mac Danzig
#74. All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.
Aldous Huxley
#75. No movement finding itself in this stage of struggle can operate by getting authority from the leading body of the political organs for even minor action that is taken and we don't even know in the case of the actions which have publicize whether they are in fact our people.
Joe Slovo
#76. If affirmative action means what I just described, what I'm for, then I'm for it.
George W. Bush
#77. Whatever happened during the French presidential campaign will leave no hard feelings. I perfectly understand why Angela Merkel supported Nicolas Sarkozy because of the action they have taken together, even though I have questioned its results, and because of their shared political sensibility.
Francois Hollande
#78. There's good art and there's bad art. A lot of action films are bad art, but Paul Greengrass showed us with the Bourne films that it's possible to make an action film with a political, social conscience.
Joe Wright
#79. The great political tragedy of our time is that conservative leaders in America have chosen to use their superior messaging and political skills to thwart serious action on global warming.
Joseph J. Romm
#80. My mind was by no means easy about the need to carry out a clandestine action in the sovereign territory of a friendly country, and the question of whether it was permissible to do so - from both the ethical and political points of view - had to be faced in all its gravity.
Isser Harel
#81. Without this original, pre-political, and pre-social community, no common project could ever come to exist. For, no project of this kind can be formed independently from its rootedness in the organic structure of desire and action.
Michel Henry
#82. 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
#83. Out in the field, any connection with home just makes you weaker. It reminds you that you were once civilized, soft; and that can get you killed faster than a bullet through the head.
Henry Mosquera
#84. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.
James Hansen
#85. It may seem ironic that the judicial branch preserves its legitimacy through refraining from action on political questions. That concept was put forward best by Justice [Felix] Frankfurter, appointed by President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt.
Sam Brownback
#86. All power is the same. Magic. Physical strength. Economic strength. Political strength. It all serves a single purpose-it gives its possessor a broader spectrum of choices. It creates alternative courses of action.
Jim Butcher
#87. The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power.
Ludwig Von Mises
#88. 'Negative liberty' is a political science term meaning a liberty from government action. It is not a liberty to anything - like the liberty to meaningfully contribute to public debate or to have ample spaces for speech.
Marvin Ammori
#89. One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us without some degree of mystical seeing and action.
Richard Rohr
#90. It's Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. Clean Air and Water Acts. Endangered Species Act. Promoted affirmative action. One could go on and on with Nixon as a New Deal liberal on domestic policy and a hawk, but one with great geo-political skills.
Douglas Brinkley
#91. Doesn't it seem more reasonable to take action to heal the social pathology that generates crime than to use gun control to blow another political toe off American liberalism during each election cycle?
Joe Bageant
#92. When one questions [Dalai Lama's] political actions, it is worth remembering that he's the single most experienced politician on the planet at this moment.
Pico Iyer
#93. In the United States, the sacrosanct nature of dreams, never to be critically assessed, may be the most powerful impediment to political radicalization and collective action.
Wolfgang Streeck
#94. I was 20 years old when, despite mass protests against military action, Iraq was invaded in 2003 - it didn't make for motivated political participation, I can tell you.
Romola Garai
#95. Why is it that when political ammunition runs low, inevitably the rusty artillery of abuse is always wheeled into action?
Adlai Stevenson I
#96. It is because the fight against the harshest aspects of unrestricted capitalism is therefore a political problem and not an intellectual one that community action remains so essential.
Barney Frank
#97. The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.
Ayn Rand
#98. I think all artists struggle to represent the geometry
of life in their own way, just like writers deal with
archetypes. There are only so many stories that you can
tell, but an infinite number of storytellers.
Henry Mosquera
#99. Life is a sewer and we are all but swimmers within it. Smart people do the backstroke. (In other words you gotta have a giggle.)
Stephen B. Pearl
#100. Autonomous state actions will regularly take forms that attempt to reinforce the authority, political longevity, and social control of the state.
Theda Skocpol
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