Political Thought Quotes

#1. One of the great virtues of Confucianism was its suppleness. Western political thought tended to be rather brittle; as soon as the state became corrupt, everything ceased to make sense. Confucianism always retained its equilibrium, like a cork that could float as well in spring water or raw sewage.

Neal Stephenson

#2. The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.

Bernard Bailyn

#3. The decisive factor for the future of Europe - and before all things, for the 'restoration' of Europe - will be whether political thought and national feelings are influenced by the reality of internationalism.

Ellen Key

#4. The Universal Declaration ... as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations ... it not only crystallizes the political thought of our times on these matters, but it has also influenced the thinking of legislators all over the world.

Dag Hammarskjold

#5. Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.

Hannah Arendt

#6. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable.

George Orwell

#7. If, however, the success of a politician is to be measured by the degree in which he is able personally to influence the course of politics, and attach to himself a school of political thought, then Mr. Mill, in the best meaning of the words, has succeeded.

Millicent Fawcett

#8. An accessible introduction to the nature of political thought. Just what I always wanted.

Chris Weitz

#9. Can one understand politics without understanding history, especially the history of political thought, and will this distinguish political philosophy from some other kinds of philosophy (such as, perhaps, logic) to which the study of history is not integral?

Raymond Geuss

#10. When we fall into the trap of ethnicization and collective responsibility, we collude with Nazi and Soviet propagandists in the abolition of political thought and the lifting of individual agency. What

Timothy Snyder

#11. If i were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism

J.M. Coetzee

#12. For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual's interests.

John Carroll

#13. Political thought in France is either nostalgic or Utopian.

Raymond Aron

#14. While no man in his right mind would advocate sending our ground forces into continental China, and such was never given a thought, the new situation did urgently demand a drastic revision of strategic planning if our political aim was to defeat this new enemy as we had defeated the old.

Douglas MacArthur

#15. A people numerically large may attain to ways of thought and enterprise that no political censure can reduce to a minimum; but under narrower conditions, it may easily come about that the whole people will fall asleep.

Bjornstjerne Bjornson

#16. The country has sorted itself ideologically into the two political parties, and those partisan attachments have hardened in recent years. It will take an extraordinary event and act of leadership to break this partisan divide. I thought 9/11 might provide such an opportunity, but it was not seized.

Thomas E. Mann

#17. The bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to support its economic and political supremacy

Paul Lafargue

#18. In the sense of worldly advantage, it no longer signified whether people thought of him as having been an authentic man of virtue. There was no more political power or influence
to be gained from maintaining that identity. But to him it still mattered.

Marisa Linton

#19. I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.

Charles Stross

#20. 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

#21. Later, given political changes and the deterioration of the world, nobody in the government thought about either arts or letters.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#22. In the beginning I thought, and still think, he did great good in giving support and encouragement to this movement. But I did not believe then, and have never believed since, that these ills can be settled by partisan political methods. They are moral and economic questions.

Ray Stannard Baker

#23. There is one solution to all of our problems: Teaching our kids clarity of thought and political representation in democracy. That's it.

Richard Dreyfuss

#24. I thought I was really a radical, political person, which of course I am not.

Lena Dunham

#25. I found out that I was a Christian for revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble.

Mark Twain

#26. It's no surprise that at the same time that American universities have engaged in a serious commitment to diversity, they have been thought-prisons. We are not talking about diversity in any real way. We are talking about brown, black, white versions of the same political ideology.

Richard Rodriguez

#27. American fundamentalist thought connected strongly to reactionary political ideology as nervous Christians pushed back against liberal reforms on many fronts.

Jay Parini

#28. I was doing political cartoons and getting angry to the point where I felt I was going to have to start making and throwing bombs. I thought I was probably a better cartoonist than a bomb maker.

Terry Gilliam

#29. Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an elite; and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail.

Albert J. Nock

#30. We all say in our own lives that money isn't everything. Love matters, friendships matter. My relationship with my kids matters. It shouldn't be a giant leap to take that thought and introduce it into political dialogue

David Cameron

#31. A mother was thinking of how to keep her naughty child in line she tried using the boogey man it didn't work ... she thought and thought then said "the Politician is going to get you" and he was never naughty again

Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

#32. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought.

Anne Applebaum

#33. 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

#34. I would say that my great political awakening was really born on Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the "Neither Victims nor Executioners" essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself. I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me.

Sam Hamill

#35. Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

Stanley Fish

#36. 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

#37. I thought I'd grow up to be a teacher, or maybe run for political office.

Jake Shimabukuro

#38. And I also thought that Richard Nixon was the greatest political education we have ever had, but it looks like we need to relearn them again.

Wavy Gravy

#39. The terms of political discourse are designed so as to prevent thought.

Noam Chomsky

#40. In a way he was lucky. He was a member of a generation that thought it
was a good, even joyous, political idea to put its brains, energy,
labor at the service of the people.

Grace Paley

#41. Political correctness is as exploitable as any other progressive ideal, but its aim is to stifle the incessant noise of those who flap their careless lips without a thought about those they might offend and why that might be important.

Marcus Brigstocke

#42. Before that no one thought of us as colored-foreign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored.

Neil Gaiman

#43. Autonomy is the capacity to act on principles that are one's own and one will exercise this capacity by means of a process of rational reflection on these principles. Autonomy is thought to be necessary for attributing political responsibility.

Alison Assiter

#44. 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

#45. We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy.

Evgeny Morozov

#46. The framers of the Constitution realized that ... there needed to be some guardian of the sober second thought, and so they created the Senate to fulfill that high and vitally important duty.

Elihu Root

#47. So efficient are the available instruments of slavery; fingerprints, lie detectors, brain washings, gas chambers; that we shiver at the thought of political change which might put these instruments in the hands of men of hate.

Bernard Baruch

#48. I dislike frontiers, political or intellectual, and I find that ignoring them is an essential catalyst for creative thought. Ideas should flow without hindrance in their natural course.

Michael Atiyah

#49. The best political economy is the care and culture of men; for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their talent to new labor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#50. My friendships and relationships in the conservative world are not predicated on political correctness and enforced conformity of thought. They are based, instead, on mutual respect, honesty and understanding - concepts many modern liberals should consider revisiting.

Tammy Bruce

#51. It was true; it was somehow not even a surprise, more like a truth that had grown for some time on the edge of his awareness, now brought into sharp relief. He thought: two thrones for the price of a few hire swords and a dose of pleasure drug.

C.S. Pacat

#52. I guess, then, that is what I find troublesome about this plan. It is too logical, too clever, too carefully thought out, and, most important of all, it has to be carried out in secret, which means that if the American public knew about it, they would be appalled and would not be supportive of it.

J.W. Amran

#53. I've thought hard about my psychological connections and I think I've managed to separate out the psychological from the legal, moral, and political.

Alan Dershowitz

#54. My concern is to keep religion and the state separated. I don't think that religion and politics go together. When you see political decisions colored by religion, decisions that affect us all ... I thought: 'I do not want to go back to medieval times.'

Bjorn Ulvaeus

#55. Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,
a total perversion of opinion;society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#56. He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

George Bernard Shaw

#57. A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.

E.B. White

#58. The reason I wrote political satire was because I thought it - politics - was important ... that public policy was important. Then I transitioned into books, then into radio.

Al Franken

#59. The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that.

David Herbert Donald

#60. Priests and politicians were equally bad, Allan thought, and it didn't make the slightest difference if they were communists, fascists, capitalists or any other political persuasion.

Jonas Jonasson

#61. Wouldn't it be grand if we thought that theater could have that impact on the political life of a country?

Patrick Stewart

#62. I consider biennial elections as a security that the sober, second thought of the people shall be law.

Fisher Ames

#63. The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

Albert Einstein

#64. It's too bad about 'Dark of the Sun.' It was really about Tshombe. When I read the script, I thought it was going to be a political movie, and I thought we might even have a hassle. But the director simplified it to brutality and bad taste.

Jim Brown

#65. I never thought of political endeavors primarily in terms of power and prestige, and I never thought of economic endeavors primarily in terms of wealth and position.

William J. Clinton

#66. Success of democracy lies within the analytical thought of a common man.

M.H. Rakib

#67. I have never really thought that the Left was much in 'array' as far as political purposes were concerned.

Noam Chomsky

#68. Lenin in 1921 observed very presciently that motion pictures were the most powerful tool ever invented to shape the way we thought. He was right. Political films can be successful.

Charlton Heston

#69. I try to watch a movie a day, if not more, and through movies, I learned about so many different political themes I hadn't been interested in and cultural things I hadn't been aware of and economic factors I hadn't thought about.

Hideo Kojima

#70. Among the droves of men with political ambitions in the United States, I found very few with that virile candor, that manly independence of thought, that often distinguished Americans in earlier times and that is invariably the preeminent trait of great characters wherever it exists.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#71. When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries.

Andrew O'Hagan

#72. I told my father I had to try political science for a year. He thought I was throwing my life away.

Paul Wolfowitz

#73. I've always wanted to be my own person and stand by the things I believe in and I thought I might lose that independence if I ran for political office.

Samuel Dash

#74. Everyone matures. When I was Newt's age, I thought I had the right answer to things. The baby-boomers as political leaders are still on trial by the American people.

Pete Du Pont

#75. I'm a raging leftist political activist. I've never had a spiritual thought in my life related to God. I'm clear that that's a human invention.

Patch Adams

#76. I would hope to inspire in my listeners a feeling of freedom - of speech, thought and political activity.

John Hall

#77. Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

Carl Bernstein

#78. A political problem thought of in military terms eventually becomes a military problem.

George C. Marshall

#79. Comedy to the Senate? Well, there certainly hasn't been a satirist or a political satirist who's done that. So, that really was uncharted territory during the campaign. But I think it's a good thing. Some people thought that it was an odd career arc, but to me it made absolute sense.

Al Franken

#80. The four cornerstones of the American political psyche are 1) emotion substituted for thought, 2) fear, 3) ignorance and 4) propaganda

Joe Bageant

#81. Any political philosophy is perfect in a given moment...but moments are fleeting.

Michele Poague

#82. Winston was an odd mix, Fitz thought: aristocrat and man of the people, a brilliant administrator who could never resist meddling in other people's departments, a charmer who was disliked by most of his political colleagues.

Ken Follett

#83. Political and social events must also be effective, but not in a very obvious fashion. But political confusion and prolonged peace undoubtedly affect creative thought but whether they respectively hinder or help it is not at all certain.

John Desmond Bernal

#84. I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat.

Florence King

#85. 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

#86. That moment was very important because it was political. That's what has to be done, so they struck a deal. She figures his is a well-thought-out motivation that she felt was worthy trade-off. The motivation here is survival, and she has to think like a leader.

Mary McDonnell

#87. The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.

Helmut Newton

#88. Whatever your issue, your cause, the festering problem you thought would be resolved - the political class has failed you.

Carly Fiorina

#89. A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.

Alan Ryan

#90. Although Verwoerd thought Africans were lower than animals, his death did not yield us any pleasure. Political assassination is not something I or the ANC ever supported. It is a primitive way of contending with an opponent

Nelson Mandela

#91. They [political leaders ] thought the only problem was the banking system, and if they fixed the banking system, all would be fine. But the banking system and the mortgage problem were symptomatic of some deeper problems, and evidently they still haven't recognized those deeper problems.

Joseph Stiglitz

#92. Recover the source of all strength in yourself, and all else will be added to you ... political freedom, the mastery of human thought, the hegemony of the world.

Sri Aurobindo

#93. No political party can or ought to exist when one of its corner-stones is opposition to freedom of thought and to the right to worship God "according to the dictate of one's own conscience," or according to the creed of any religious denomination whatever.

Ulysses S. Grant

#94. The sensation was an explosion of feelings, leaving in its place a pleasured memory of that moment. That, thought Seth, was pure heaven

Kenneth Eade

#95. Often GOP political strategy seems like the human wave theory of the Chinese military translated to politics. Where Beijing uses masses of soldiers to overwhelm their adversaries, the GOP uses huge campaign budgets as a substitute for strategy, thought or issues.

Dick Morris

#96. I never thought that I could reach such a high political position. But I have always been ready to serve my country.

Atifete Jahjaga

#97. In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds - that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.

Robert H. Jackson

#98. I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul.

Joan Didion

#99. I had always thought about running for high political office, and I was kind of waiting for the stars to line up. And, you know, they don't hold the door open for you. You kind of have to muscle your way in.

Matt Cartwright

#100. Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.

William Kristol