Political Quotes - Page 8

As Obama would tell me one occasion, "I can't defend it unless I understand it." I rarely saw him rush to a decision when circumstances allowed him time to gather information, analyze, and reflect...When the occasion demand it, though, Obama could make a big decision - a life-and-death decision - very fast." Page 299

. . . [O]nce we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.""The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.""Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex.

This gentleman evidently belonged to the category of those people who wish the Government to interfere in everything, even in their daily quarrels with their wives.

It's easier to run a revolution than a government.

Actions & statements made on the basis of critical analysis & discernmentare not the same as divisiveness. Know the difference.

I have always been afraid of banks.

The political spectrum is not a straight, bi-polar line. It's a circle.

Criminal activity exploded throughout the city – thugs multiplied by the thousands. Without fear of rebuke, there was nothing to stop them. It is the ultimate penalty that comes with tolerating the intolerant.

When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.

I always thought Obama was "presidential." He treated the office of the presidency with respect. I rarely saw him in the Oval Office with a coat and tie, and he always conducted himself with dignity. He was a man of personal integrity, and in his personal behavior - at least to the extent I could observe it - he was an excellent role model...I thought Obama was first-rate in both intellect and temperament." Page 300

By making the government a combination of elected officials and citizen-backed initiatives and referenda, there can truly be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

What if I've died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you're locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?

A convoluted mind believes a fallacy of covert assertion, that the gesture of goodwill toward the well-being of any group of people, should only be accepted from a specific race or party – this is ignorance of the highest order.

Be careful when building walls to protect yourself. Those same walls may cage you in.

You are the posterity of your family. You are either continuing the progression or regression of your ancestors.

Having two non-functional parties is not a democracy, it's a losing coin flip.

In one of his puckish moods Saul talked the president of a university into letting him anonymously take an examination being administered to candidates for a doctorate in community organization. "Three of the questions were on the philosophy of and motivations of Saul Alinsky," writes Saul. "I answered two of them incorrectly.

Once you are in power, never forget those who put you there. Deal with those who think they can do better than you and those who think you are god's representative on earth. Deal with each other according to his actions

In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.

There has never been a more important time to vote for the Green Party!

Freedom of speech is detestable only to those who have no desire to think for themselves.

Life is politics, you do it or it does you

Have you ever found yourself saying, "There ought to be a law against this," or, "Somebody should do something"? Well, here’s the good news - you can be the one to do something. You can be the one to make the law.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organised political resistance

When enough people understand reality, tyrants can literally be ignored out of existence. They can't ever be voted out of existence.

Truth is commodity in political consumption.

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.

Oppressors specialise in rasing wolves from amonst the sheep then together with the wolves devour the sheep

Beneath all this he is able to identify as well the dangers of a humanism which shuts out the humane and transcendent horizons and can threaten a new form of the dark night of the soul.

Woe to any sheep that hunts with wolves - rjs

... had to pee like a racehorse at an Iced Tea convention.

Maybe I`m getting to the age when I`m starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now. You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot - both on the Right and the Left.

How could he uphold the law when that law upheld injustice?

If we are not registering bad events in history to learn from them, then why are we even still publishing them at all? Is it really an outlandish ideal to want a peaceful and prosperous nation, one ruled only by compassion, truth and justice? As of now, there is no peace, no truth, no prosperity, no compassion - and NO COMMON SENSE. Since when did the words human and inhumane share the same meaning?

The first step in solving a problem is recognizing there is one

The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and allelse, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!

I turned to books for comfort. (Former First Lady, Laura Bush)

In essence I find that the foundation of modern conservatism is driven by a clinging to God in fear of the world, whereas the foundation of modern liberalism is a clinging to the world in fear of God; albeit, the true foundation should be one's clinging to God in fear of God.

Excluding certain ideas and thoughts, calling them hate speech, is an important piece in the progressive movement’s puzzle. If you can’t win an argument logically, demonize your opponent, make him out to be a bad person and all of a sudden the ideas he stands for become bad as well.