Top 100 Political Self Quotes
#1. We've gotta restore the American people's confidence in the ethics process by ensuring that political self-interest can no longer prevent politicians from enforcing ethics rules.
Barack Obama
#2. Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? ... And just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us.
Milton Friedman
#3. One of the more pretentious political self-descriptions is 'Libertarian.' People think it puts them above the fray. It sounds fashionable, and to the uninitiated, faintly dangerous. Actually, it's just one more bullshit political philosophy.
George Carlin
#4. 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
#5. It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle.
Tom DeLay
#6. If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time.
Steven Pinker
#7. When men organize themselves into groups, and they make rules based on common or self-interest, it's always tangled and political.
Andrew Dominik
#8. One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected.
Theodore Dalrymple
#9. What might be good for ratings can be bad for the country. The hard-core partisans are self-segregating themselves into separate political realities. But the majority of Americans are starting to wake up to the game.
John Avlon
#10. We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves - with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#11. I am a political animal, because for God's sakes I think "We The People" is a job. I think experienced self government demands on all levels - intellectual, moral, historical, and spiritual level. We are supposed to be engaged and give directions to our elected employees.
Ted Nugent
#12. America glories in its tradition of the self-made individual. Political candidates compete to be a friend to entrepreneurs, and policymakers, imagining the next Microsoft or Google, design laws to back the innovator in the garage.
Mark McKinnon
#13. My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility
Camille Paglia
#14. In my opinion, a war between England and Germany was a war between brothers. In my inner self I admired the English government and political system.
Walter Schellenberg
#15. 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
#16. Politically I am neither left nor right! And this kind of political-ethical standpoint
being in the middle
usually brings about seclusion and isolation! But now I do not mind it anymore and, instead, I work more and more in my self-made solitude!
Javad Alizadeh
#17. The political restructuring we pursue in China is aimed at advancing the self-improvement and development of the socialist political system. We will continue to expand people's democracy and build a socialist country under the rule of law in keeping with China's national conditions.
Hu Jintao
#18. 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
#19. If the perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom, it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientific questions.
Thomas Huxley
#20. 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
#21. A politician lost an argument; he went on a rampage with his fists pointed towards the sky - a move which amounts to a search for a new self.
Duop Chak Wuol
#22. Therefore, any social or political system in which people get things they don't earn, or are rewarded for lack of self-discipline or for immoral behavior, is simply an immoral system.
George Lakoff
#24. Husbands lie, Masha. I should know; I've eaten my share. That's lesson one. Lesson number two: among the topics about which a husband is most likely to lie are money, drink, black eyes, political affiliation, and women who squatted on his lap before and after your sweet self.
Catherynne M Valente
#25. 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.
Lucy Parsons
#26. This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. ... It has turned whole nations, such as the United States, into self-consuming machines of death.
Chris Hedges
#27. Resilience is a systematic adaptation of the oppressed self under the arbitrary imposition of the political order. Emancipation is the liberation of the self from the oppressive imposition of the political order upon the self.
Bruno De Oliveira
#28. By a combination of formal training and self study, the latter continuing systematically well into the 1940s, I was able to gain a broad base of knowledge in economics and political science, together with reasonable skills in advanced mathematics, symbolic logic, and mathematical statistics.
Herbert A. Simon
#29. Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
George Orwell
#30. Monetary freedom (gold: sound money), like all other economic freedoms, clears the way for energy, intellect and virtue ... Political control weakens individual self-reliance and energy, causes want and poverty and, in the end, breeds tyranny and oppression.
Hans F. Sennholz
#31. We have very little faith in the Lord, very little trust. If we trusted the Lord as much as we trust a friend when we ask him to do something for us, neither we as individuals nor our whole country would suffer so much.
Thaddeus Of Vitovnica
#32. Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?
Alan Sokal
#33. Self-promotion is a leadership and political skill that is critical to master in order to navigate the realities of the workplace and position you for success.
Bonnie Marcus
#34. Some of us realize the self-evident truth that no election, no constitution, no legislation, and no other pseudo-religious political ritual can bestow upon anyone the right to rule another. Nothing can make a man into a rightful master; nothing can make a man into a rightful slave.
Larken Rose
#35. Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.
Giuseppe Prezzolini
#36. There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#37. Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective.
Lewis Hyde
#38. When Numa died, Rome by the twin disciplines of peace and war was as eminent for self-mastery as for military power.
Livy
#39. In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's a great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.
Simon Schama
#40. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Audre Lorde
#41. Political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means of meeting poverty and illiteracy and disease. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope.
John F. Kennedy
#42. The separation of religion from the practical affairs of society is a convenient doctrine for those who fear that social change would threaten of modify their own political and social self-interest.
William Stringfellow
#43. Self-proclaimed saviors and other outliers come and go throughout our political history. Occasionally, they're successful; most times, they're not. But the system has rebalanced toward the basic principles of tolerance, freedom and democracy that were set forth by the Founders.
David Ignatius
#44. As a candidate, Obama disdained the game of politics, a self-conscious contrast to all the tireless political athletes named Clinton.
Nancy Gibbs
#45. Any self-defense class worth its salt will tell you that
you don't pull out a weapon unless you intend to use it.
The same should apply to ballsy remarks.
Henry Mosquera
#46. By contrast, China is a repressive regime that denies its citizens the essential freedoms of religion, political dissent and representative self-government.
Todd Akin
#47. Many of the self-described "political refugees" who come here make stopovers in other countries on their way to the U.S., in places where they would be free to have as many children as they want. But they choose to continue on to the U.S. Why? Because it is more economically attractive.
Ed Koch
#48. Self-regulation stands in relation to regulation the way self-importance stands in relation to importance.
Willem Buiter
#49. That the regime was willing to hit itts chief political constituency in the pocket was a clear sign of desperation.
Peter Heather
#50. I am dead against trying to keep religious conservatives out of the political debate. The tactic of exclusion is self-defeating.
Harvey Cox
#51. Socialism is, among other things, the political habitat of low self-esteem, incompetence, self-loathing, and a willingness to steal - or have stolen for you what you are unable or unwilling to work for. Socialism is a philosophy fit only for slugs, leaches, and mosquitoes.
L. Neil Smith
#52. Unfortunately, the media, which are not at all reluctant to act in their own self-interest, have succeeded in equating reform in the public mind with further restrictions on just about everyone else's freedom of political speech.
James L. Buckley
#53. And, sure, if you have a political point of view, you have every right to share it. But you have to be careful not to get too self-important. You have to find the balance between being entertaining and being preachy.
Patrick Dempsey
#54. Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#55. You can't help people being right for the wrong reasons ... This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence.
Arthur Koestler
#56. John Hay indicates that dealing with people directly as a holder of political office "requires a stronger heart and a more obedient nervous system than I possess.
John Taliaferro
#57. My fear is that many institutions will eventually alter how they treat people who refuse to self-track. There are all sorts of political and moral implications here, and I'm not sure that we have grappled with any of them.
Evgeny Morozov
#58. Self-preservation and self-denial: the basis of all political economy.
Lord Acton
#59. The philanthropic tradition is older than democracy, older than Christianity, and older than higher education. It gives form and purpose to personal and social life that cannot be provided by the self-interest of economic enterprise or required by the mandate of political institutions.
Robert L. Payton
#60. To me, you have to declare yourself a Chicano in order to be a Chicano. That makes a Chicano a Mexican-American with a defiant political attitude that centers on his or her right to self-definition. I'm a Chicano because I say I am.
Cheech Marin
#61. Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.
Jerry Brown
#62. It was also the year that ushered in the birth of a soul who was to grow up in a Maharashtrian home as a rabid Hindu nationalist; allegedly a closet homosexual and a staunch, self-styled "patriot" who would be globally abhorred for the most shocking political assassination, the world had ever known.
Neelima Dalmia Adhar
#63. That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.
Will Self
#65. Choosing to accept yourself is a political act. An act of liberation.
Francesca Martinez
#66. If the fundamental principles in the Declaration of Independence, as self-evident truths, are real truths, the existence of slavery, in any form, is a wrong.
John Quincy Adams
#67. In historical and constitutional terms, the recent political status vote in Puerto Rico was a necessary but obviously not decisive step on the road of self-determination leading to full self-government.
Dick Thornburgh
#68. Fear is being used by the political class as an excuse to accumulate more power and self-importance - and collect a lot more taxes to support their agenda.
Doug Casey
#69. The man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient, is no part of the polis, and must therefore be either a beast or a god.
Aristotle.
#70. If the self-discipline of the free cannot match the iron discipline of the mailed fist, in economic, political, scientific, and all the other kinds of struggles, as well as the military, then the peril to freedom will continue to rise.
John F. Kennedy
#71. The good news, to relieve all this gloom, is that a democracy is inherently self-correcting. Here, the people are sovereign. Inept political leaders can be replaced. Foolish policies can be changed. Disastrous mistakes can be reversed.
Theodore C. Sorensen
#72. Since the songs were written over a five-year period, I think these are little snapshots. Some people call it political or topical, but I think each song is self-contained. I think it fits together as a picture of the last half-decade of time.
Conor Oberst
#73. Fear brings out the basest instincts," writes British political scientist Sue Goss, "and narrows our sense of belonging to self-preservation."16
Diana Butler Bass
#74. And I know what it is that's going to destroy the world. Lack of communication - reciprocal communication: cultural, political, intellectual - whatever you like. But more, it's snobbery and self-deceit, which are artificial, protective barriers that prevent communication.
Angus Stewart
#75. Clinton's egregious act of self-indulgence was outdone by an impeachment based not on constitutionally required high crimes and misdemeanors but on a vindictive determination to bring down a president who had offended self-righteous moralists eager to put a different political agenda in place.
Robert Dallek
#76. Self-government does not and should not imply the use of political agencies alone. Progress is born of cooperation in the community - not from governmental restraints.
Herbert Hoover
#77. Only a self capable of being jolted out of its mundane complacency is up to the task of both hearing what repair demands and helping to invent new responses to harms that no preexisting remedy fully comprehends.
Jill Stauffer
#78. To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#79. A 2013 study by Riley Dunlap and political scientist Peter Jacques found that a striking 72 percent of climate denial books, mostly published since the 1990s, were linked to right-wing think tanks, a figure that rises to 87 percent if self-published books (increasingly common) are excluded.23
Naomi Klein
#80. I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
Norman Mailer
#81. Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was diverted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy.
Gordon S. Wood
#82. As every organizer knows, the first step to empowerment is the recognition of self-worth and the identification of one's interests with that of others. Political mobilization depends on this.
John Restakis
#83. Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self.
Tom Robbins
#84. I'm guessing that musicals didn't make sense anymore because of the changes in the political environment that began in the late Sixties, an era of self-awareness and social revolutions.
Carmen Ejogo
#85. Economic development is something much wider and deeper than economics, let alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the economic sphere, in education, organisation, discipline and, beyond that, in political independence and a national consciousness of self-reliance.
E.F. Schumacher
#86. Every policy is shaped by two forces: background analysis and foreground politics. The political forces are loud, self-serving and, in the case of energy policy, well known.
Donella Meadows
#87. Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called self-interestedness. This was not a
George Will
#88. Gen Y is depicted as self-centred and apathetic when it comes to politics, but it doesn't help that we are largely overlooked. There have been policies to woo parents, pensioners and the sick, but the young do not appear to rank high on any political agenda.
Alexandra Adornetto
#89. Now that the there is a path for the people of Puerto Rico to express their self-determination on Puerto Rico's political status, there are some who seek to block that path.
Dick Thornburgh
#90. While writing 'City Boy,' I relied mainly on my own memories. In particular, I was able to describe the effect of gay liberation on an individual life (mine) as events paralleled my own growing self-acceptance; in this case, the political truly was the personal.
Edmund White
#91. In short, I do not believe the cynical liberal claim that the details of conservative political policies are just due to a self-serving ultrarich conspiracy, though the interests and finances of the ultrarich are certainly engaged.
George Lakoff
#92. Art is self-sufficient and need serve no moral or political purpose
Walter Pater
#93. No one in al-Nahda believes that jihad is a way to impose Islam on the world. But we believe that jihad is self-control, is social and political struggle, and even military jihad is only a way to defend oneself in the case of aggression.
Rashid Al-Ghannushi
#94. 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.
Julian Assange
#95. Unless our fundamental sacred connectedness with every being and thing is experienced deeply and enacted everywhere, religious, political, and other differences will go on creating intolerable conflict that can only increase the already dangerously high chances of our self-annihilation.
Andrew Harvey
#96. 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.
Ron Fournier
#97. People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.
Vladimir Lenin
#98. I believe that if something like a political life is to remain for us in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships.
Ivan Illich
#99. Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.
Hannah Arendt
#100. If Congress does its job in this regard, the residents of Puerto Rico will be empowered to act in their own self-interest and express their future political status aspirations accordingly.
Dick Thornburgh
