Top 68 Political Language Quotes
#1. I'm very political without being political. I don't know how to speak proper political language.
Taki Theodoracopulos
#2. The word 'right' should be excluded from political language, as the word 'cause' from the language of philosophy.
Auguste Comte
#3. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell
#4. Aside from the basic African dialects, I would try to learn Chinese, because it looks as if Chinese will be the most powerful political language of the future.
Malcolm X
#5. In the political language of today, people who want to keep what they have earned are said to be greedy, while those who wish to take their earnings from them and give it to others (who will vote for them in return) show compassion.
Thomas Sowell
#6. We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.
Vladimir Putin
#7. Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.
Reza Aslan
#8. Political chaos is connected with the decay of language ... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
George Orwell
#9. Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.
Pete Hamill
#10. Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.
Jimmy Carter
#11. America is destined to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs.
John Adams
#12. The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology, because among political parties, as elsewhere, the vulgar make the language, and the vulgar abandon more easily the ideas that have been instilled into it than the words that it has learnt.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#13. I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators 'the haute couture of language.'
Anna Deavere Smith
#14. I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.
Barbara Kingsolver
#15. My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask who authorized them (the framers of the Constitution) to speak the language of 'We, the People,' instead of 'We, the States'?
Patrick Henry
#16. A new race-neutral language was developed for appealing to old racist sentiments, a language accompanied by a political movement that succeeded in putting the vast majority of blacks back in their place.
Michelle Alexander
#17. The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.
George Orwell
#18. The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.
Helmut Newton
#19. In scientific matters there was a common language and one standard of values; in moral and political problems there were many. ... Furthermore, in science there is a court of last resort, experiment, which is unavailable in human affairs.
Emilio G. Segre
#20. That ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.
Roland Barthes
#21. As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
W. H. Auden
#22. The Republic of Macedonia is being built on democratic ideals and values, not on ethnic groups. Those ideals and values include economic opportunities, language and educational opportunities, religious rights, and political processes.
Boris Trajkovski
#23. On the contrary a film can promote the idea of change without any political message whatsoever but in its form and language can tell people that they can change their lives and contribute to progressive changes in the world.
Wim Wenders
#24. That means that every human being - without distinction of sex, age, race, skin color, language, religion, political view, or national or social origin - possesses an inalienable and untouchable dignity.
Hans Kung
#25. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.
George Orwell
#26. I think maybe since there isn't a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don't understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out.
Thom Yorke
#27. Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.
Umberto Eco
#28. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.
Matt Taibbi
#29. The world of public discourse - political, social, diplomatic, commercial - has so corrupted language that we are rightly more suspicious of the meaning of words than we are convinced of their veracity. Language has been turned on its head.
Deena Metzger
#30. Political correctness sometimes does great work when it helps equalize the playing field when it comes to language, but it does a great disservice when it tries to silence a person of color.
Margaret Cho
#31. Her father was frightened by a strange bed or a foreign language or a political party he didn't belong to. Her father truly believed that the Democratic party was a subversive organization whose design would destroy the United States and put it in the hands of bearded communists.
John Steinbeck
#32. The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.
Nick Clegg
#33. Language usage always has a political context.
Jackson Katz
#34. Faith and politics are now one and the same," he went on. "Perhaps it was always so, but it seems to have reached new extremes in our troubled century, do you not think? A man's religion tells me where his political loyalties lie, far more than his place of birth or his language.
S.J. Parris
#35. What you see and hear is a situation in which languages are less like apples - neat and discrete - and more like oatmeal. It's always been oatmeal in India, and all the varieties of oatmeal continue to merge, despite political pressures to name them as if they were marbles.
Michael Erard
#36. The world of sports knows no religious, racial or political differences. Athletes, from whatever land they come, speak the same language. The lessons of competition are lessons for life.
Robert Kennedy
#37. In these days of political, personal and economic disintegration, music is not a luxury, it's a necessity; not simply because it is therapeutic, nor because it is the universal language, but because it is the persistent focus of our intelligence, aspiration and goodwill.
Robert Shaw
#38. It is silly to call fat people 'gravitationally challenged' - a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
Terry Eagleton
#39. I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.
David Plotz
#40. The German stamp on Wisconsin endures in the state's commitment to efficient agriculture, hard work, education, culture, and to good citizenship and political freedom - all of which were an integral part of the German immigrant's language.
Richard H. Zeitlin
#41. In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.
Kathy Acker
#42. Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.
June Jordan
#43. All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
Roland Barthes
#44. It says a lot about Sandberg's brand of feminism that this campaign focuses on policing language rather than bringing attention to important issues that have real impact on women and girls
Jessica Roy
#45. If you spend seventy-two hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter.
P. J. O'Rourke
#47. The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
Learned Hand
#48. 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
#49. Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.
Jurgen Habermas
#50. From every ancient source, we have testimony to Cleopatra's irresistible charm, as Plutarch has it, to her ability to speak many languages including, as he puts it, the language of flattery and essentially, to be able to turn people to her will - really a great political genius, in that respect.
Stacy Schiff
#51. If you spend 72 hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter. Either that or you're President Obama.
P. J. O'Rourke
#52. Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
Terry Eagleton
#53. My responsibility is to make a film and find my dramatic language; I don't have any political or social responsibility.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#54. My plea is for banishing the English language as a cultural usurper, as we successfully banished the political rule of the English usurper.
Mahatma Gandhi
#55. Politics is the art of promising heaven and delivering purgatory, and claiming hero status for saving your country from hell.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#56. With our gift for language and willingness to stand up and be counted, as well as heaps of charm and charisma, we Irish have long been an integral part of American political life.
Rashers Tierney
#57. When the American people look at the political process play out, they hear all the spinning and all the doctrinaire language, and they still walk away with the belief that they're not being represented in Congress, that there's no trust in the executive branch.
David Gregory
#58. A landscape image cuts across all political and national boundaries, it transcends the constraints of language and culture.
Charlie Waite
#59. So when you are faced with a decision on the euro, it is not surprising that many people are confused. They still try to squeeze the euro debate into the old language. But deep down it is a matter of deciding where one's future lies. It is a matter of political will and courage.
Romano Prodi
#60. Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity
Bill Bryson
#61. Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance - or soon, even language.
Thomas Friedman
#62. We cannot be divided either by the languages we speak, by the faiths we profess or by the political views we choose.
Viktor Yushchenko
#63. The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.
S.I. Hayakawa
#64. These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional "victims" who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime.
Gad Saad
#65. Fashion is not a government, is not political; and yet it mantles the world much the way religion does. It includes and enforces its own rules, liturgies, disciplines. It has its own territories, its own language, its own hierarchy.
Richard De Combray
#66. I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.
Thom Yorke
#67. If political correctness has achieved one thing, it's that it has made the Conservative party cloak their inherent racism behind more creative language
Stewart Lee
#68. Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.
Gilles Deleuze
