Political Quotes

#1. One of the great dangers in political engagement is misplaced hope.

Shane Claiborne

#2. To imagine secret societies and conspiracy is a way not to react to the social and political life. Because you say, "We don't know who they are. We cannot react without reasoning." So it is a way to keep people far from the political environment.

Umberto Eco

#3. Language usage always has a political context.

Jackson Katz

#4. It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well-dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children.

Dai Sijie

#5. I cannot doubt that women will line up, like the men elected, with the groups whose political thinking and convictions are in accord with their own political convictions.

Edith Rogers

#6. 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

#7. Compassion is not a dirty word.. it's time we rehabilitated compassion into the national political vocabulary of this great nation of ours.

Kevin Rudd

#8. All kinds of celebrities, political ones as well, are increasingly being targeted. In this country, with all the countless guns.

Cesar Romero

#9. Sometimes people with strong ideology, whether left-wing or right-wing, refuse to do something simply because they believe it is wrong, when doing it actually benefits them. For some people, it's not just about money and political power.

Ha-Joon Chang

#10. However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.

Simon Mainwaring

#11. As long as anger, paranoia and misinformation drive our political debate, there are unhinged souls among us who will feel justified in turning to violent remedies for imagined threats.

David Horsey

#12. Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum.

Christopher Dawson

#13. We do not deny the possibility of peaceful [political] transition, but we are still awaiting the first case.

Fidel Castro

#14. War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

Adrienne Rich

#15. Human beings are by nature political animals

Aristotle.

#16. From this brief account of the origins of the English Reformation under Henry VIII, it will be clear that there are reasons for supposing that Henry's agenda was political, dominated by his desire to safeguard his succession and secure his own authority throughout his kingdom. Through

Alister E. McGrath

#17. I'm guessing you thought I was way off on your political philosophy but right on the button about the other two. Just think about that for a while.

John Scalzi

#18. Get some distance on yourself and undertand the multilevel structure that's operating. There's a power structure within you. You're a very political creature.

Frederick Lenz

#19. [ ... ] The goal of Communism and the New World Order always has been the destruction of family. This forces people to get their sense of belonging from the elite-run media, political causes or products.

Henry Makow

#20. The democracy process provides for political and social change without violence.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#21. I am troubled that sometimes in our political discourse we spend all of our time focused on the challenges of the next century rather than on the opportunities of the new century.

Marco Rubio

#22. But while capitalism may be a convenient scapegoat, it did not cause any of these problems. Indeed, whatever one wishes to call the unruly mixture of freedom and government controls that made up our economic and political system during the last three decades, one cannot call it capitalism.

Yaron Brook

#23. My mission is to convert every Indian, every Englishman and finally the world to nonviolence for regulating mutual relations, whether political, economic, social or religious.

Mahatma Gandhi

#24. Political leaders can help change the psychological climate which affects the quality of relationships among people.

Ehud Olmert

#25. Being political doesn't only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election; to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers.

Alain De Botton

#26. The devotion that young Chinese feel to the Internet is driven by deep factors ranging from youth unemployment and income inequality to political repression and the demographic imbalance between men and women.

Evan Osnos

#27. What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it.

Timothy Snyder

#28. I think clear heads will prevail and the correct enemy will be identified, political enemy will be identified, and efforts will come together to defeat whoever it is they throw up - Democrats, I mean.

Rush Limbaugh

#29. Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power.

Rollo May

#30. Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

Vaclav Havel

#31. Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.

Jose Saramago

#32. Once you have hundreds of millions of dollars, it's hard to know where to put it all. Art is transportable, unregulated, glamorous, arcane, beautiful, difficult. It is easier to store than oil, more esoteric than diamonds, more durable than political influence.

Nick Paumgarten

#33. Europe resolved a great problem-the problem of the Zionist danger. The Zionists, who constituted a strong political party in Europe, caused much disorder there. Since they had a lot of property and controlled an empire of propaganda, they made the European governments helpless.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

#34. Impressed with a conviction that the due administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good Government, I have considered the first arrangement of the Judicial department as essential to the happiness of our Country, and to the stability of its political system.

George Washington

#35. The fastest growing political party is no party.

Chuck Todd

#36. I'd rather talk to people about their personal spiritual practices or what they believe love is. I'm born to do that. Could I enter into the political realm and dive into that? Sure, but I don't think I would want to do that.

Alanis Morissette

#37. First of all, my persuasion is what really breeds violence is political differences. But because religion serves as the soul of community, it gets drawn into the fracas and turns up the heat.

Huston Smith

#38. American agents ... are the only persons authorized to hold councils of a political nature.

Zebulon Pike

#39. Many people are trying to remove religion from public life. Under the banner of pluralism, cultural and political leaders are seeking to push all talk about God out of the public arena.

Charles Colson

#40. Peace should be understood in a human way - in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.

Muhammad Yunus

#41. I think it's probably much easier to do political comedy from a two-party point of view, in that the majority have some sense of what it means to be one or the other.

Doug Stanhope

#42. Statism is political fashion.
Individual liberty is eternal.

A.E. Samaan

#43. The ever-growing power of a soulless political bureaucracy which supervises and safeguards the life of man from the cradle to the grave is putting ever-greater obstacles in the way of co-operation among human beings.

Rudolf Rocker

#44. We're certainly not perfect, and we're not probably even better than anybody else, except that perhaps we are given to certain kinds of contemplation that provide a valuable balance to the knee-jerk reactionary behavior of most of our newspapers and political leaders. Poets are great doubters.

Sam Hamill

#45. For citizens to become fully engaged in holding their leadership to account, accurate information is required to see where action is needed, to measure the results of policies and programmes, to build support for courageous decisions and to consolidate political legitimacy.

Mo Ibrahim

#46. it is important to stress that history is always constructed, not absolute or unchallangeable. Histories are stories about the past, and reconstructing the past ill involve elements of mythologising from the cultural, political and theoretical stances of both the historian and the informants.

John O'Toole

#47. The Canadian people are more practical than imaginative. Romantic tales and poetry would meet with less favour in their eyes than a good political article from their newspapers.

Susanna Moodie

#48. To me, feminism is such a simple description: it's equal rights, economic rights, political rights, and social rights.

Callie Khouri

#49. When facing the public, politicians constantly filter their ideas through a political sieve. 'How will this affect the environmentalists, labor, management?' Sometimes the sieve gets so clogged by political taboos that no new ideas pass through.

Madeleine M. Kunin

#50. There is no governing structure for a pandemic, and little more than vague political pressure to ensure limited access to life-sparing tools and medicines for more than half the world population.

Laurie Garrett

#51. To be honest, I want readers to be wrung out. As a novelist, I don't have a political agenda or specific philosophy; I'm trying to create a gut-wrenching, intimate, memorable experience.

Jillian Medoff

#52. We can't accommodate terrorism. When someone uses the slaughter of innocent people to advance a so-called political cause, at that point the political cause becomes immoral and unjust and they should be eliminated from any serious discussion, any serious debate.

Rudy Giuliani

#53. To somebody like Obama, substantive opposition is not tolerable. The objective is to eliminate all opposition - be it a political party, be it media, or what have you.

Rush Limbaugh

#54. In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.

Jesse Jackson

#55. It's not unusual to find big political shifts that take place beneath the surface before they're visible above the surface.

Al Gore

#56. Young Chinese, who have grown up in an age of prosperity and stability, are typically the most passionate defenders of the Chinese political and economic way.

Evan Osnos

#57. You can't let a candidate run for too long. He will be dragged along, cut apart, put back together and ripped to shreds again - from both the political opponents and the media.

Peer Steinbruck

#58. If we were to have a presidential election in Europe it would be an event that would spark a huge interest in people from Lisbon to Helsinki, just like national elections. And it would create a completely different political setting in Europe.

Wolfgang Schauble

#59. No matter what you experience in life, it incorporates political tendencies, and in so many ways.

John Lydon

#60. When the political columnists say 'Every thinking man' they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to 'Every intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them

Franklin P. Adams

#61. 'Hell in a Handbasket' is not dealing with the political nature of the country. It's dealing with the humanity and the compassion of the world.

Meat Loaf

#62. Hopefully, Serbia's political leaders will not only recognize the seriousness which we attach to this case but also understand that it is in Serbia's interest to let justice work to sever the ties with the Milosevic past that have held the country back from a Europe where it otherwise belongs.

Tim Bishop

#63. The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

Sarah Churchwell

#64. The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It's not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.

Tony Blair

#65. Enlightenment is not about being political. It is not a social club. Ashrams often turn into that, I know. Societies of enlightenment often just become cliques.

Frederick Lenz

#66. Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

Honore De Balzac

#67. We have a complete void of progressive politics in this country right now. The will of the people goes ignored and unrealized. I'm searching for the people that can enter the political system, a strong third party. We need to consolidate.

Ani DiFranco

#68. The classic formulation of the materialist conception of history is that of the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, written in 1859.

Anonymous

#69. I am not a political person, so I cannot comment on politics.

Andrew Tan

#70. I wanted to tell a romantic and dark side of Ottoman history that was also slightly political, saying to the previous generation of writers, 'Look, I'm interested in Ottoman things, and I'm not afraid of it, and I'm doing something creative.'

Orhan Pamuk

#71. If you maintain a consistent political position long enough, you'll eventually be accused of treason.

Mort Sahl

#72. They're such hierarchical things, film sets, they're sort of mini societies. Often they're incredibly political places.

Eddie Redmayne

#73. I think I developed a culture of healthy skepticism of claims of certainty on any side of the aisle. A sort of boldness in using economics no matter where it leads you in political circles, you know, rather than worrying about being left-wing or right-wing or biased or this or that.

David Plotz

#74. I'm not new to the political process; I was making a contribution as the speaker of the third largest and most diverse state in the country well before I even got into the Senate.

Marco Rubio

#75. The human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really philosophers acquire political power or until, through some divine dispensation, those who rule and have political authority in the cities become real philosophers.

Plato

#76. What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.

Soren Kierkegaard

#77. Political poetry is more profoundly emotional than any other-at least as much as love poetry-and cannot be forced because then it becomes vulgar and unacceptable. It is necessary first to pan though all other poetry in order to become a political poet.

Pablo Neruda

#78. The decline of religious belief,which has all sorts of effects on morals and even on politics because religion has been a tool of politics. But today in Europe it ceases to be a tool, it has very little influence in determining political decisions -

Will Durant

#79. You can almost see voters nodding their heads at home: The public's faith in politicians and political institutions has been on a steep and dangerous decline for decades, because elected leaders fail to deliver.

Ron Fournier

#80. If the great story of the last century was the conflict among various political ideologies-communism, fascism and democracy-then the great narrative of this century will be the changes wrought by astonishing scientific breakthroughs

Cynthia Tucker

#81. To live with our enemies as if they may some time become our friends, and to live with our friends as if they may some time become our enemies, is not a moral but a political maxim

Thomas Paine

#82. Our politics is very masculine, very aggressive, and it's very polarizing. And the pace of this development has increased in recent years. Erdogan is, in my eyes, the most polarizing politician in recent Turkish political history.

Elif Safak

#83. As the nation's elderly population grows, dozens of industries have tried to harness the political might of older Americans for corporate goals.

Charles Duhigg

#84. I'm entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I'm an American.

David Mamet

#85. I think everybody's political. The act of being alive is political. Unless you choose to be a hermit, you're automatically political because you're part of a community.

Julianne Moore

#86. Earth's orbital grid was a mish-mash of new and old systems, not even a tenth as deadly as it should be due to political considerations that, until very recently, seemed so incredibly important.

Evan Currie

#87. Worst of all, however, is the devastation wrought by the misuse of religious conviction for political ends. In truth, we cannot sharply enough attack those wretched crooks who would like to make religion an implement to perform political or rather business services for them.

Adolf Hitler

#88. And I remember looking at Gray Davis and, you know, Gray is the consummate political operative.

Mike Curb

#89. To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?

Curtis Sittenfeld

#90. Obviously, I haven't succeeded in defusing the political concerns about the Fed.

Ben Bernanke

#91. As a political independent, I would gladly vote for any political party dedicated to limited government and entrepreneurship.

Arthur C. Brooks

#92. The need for peace in Northern Ireland goes well beyond political stability. It now speaks to regional Europe and even global stability.

Hillary Clinton

#93. A profound political question is suddenly on the table: Must the country continue to give precedence to private financial gain and market determinism over human lives and broad public values?

William Greider

#94. The Truth about Leo Strauss is the most balanced and insightful book yet written about Strauss's thought, students, and political influence. It dispels myths promulgated by both friends and foes and persuasively traces the conflicting paths that American thinkers indebted to Strauss have taken.

William Galston

#95. Well football teams are perhaps easier to control than political parties, I'm sure the Prime Minister would agree with me, but yeah I think every team needs discipline and a sense of self-belief and that's important, that's what leadership's all about.

Iain Duncan Smith

#96. All fundamental political problems are problems of relationships; therefore, all fundamental solutions have to involve fundamental changes in relationships.

F. David Mathews

#97. The point is, the political reporters are the ones who no longer understand the ritual they are covering. They keep searching for political meanings in the tepid events when a convention is now essentially a human drama and only that.

William Greider

#98. Liberal dominance of important areas of America's social and political life has undermined many of the virtues that have sustained this country.

Mona Charen

#99. I'm not a political thinker, but I've just always thought of myself as a Labour supporter. I was a great fan of Tony Blair. He sent me a letter before I swam the Channel to wish me luck.

David Walliams

#100. I was told to challenge every spiritual teacher, every world leader to utter the one sentence that no religion, no political party, and no nation on the face of the earth will dare utter: 'Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.

Neale Donald Walsch