Quotes About Political

Novels are political not because writers carry party cards -- some do, I do not -- but because good fiction is about identifying with and understanding people who are not necessarily like us. By nature all good novels are political because identifying with the other is political. At the heart of the 'art of the novel' lies the human capacity to see the world through others' eyes. Compassion is the greatest strength of the novelist.

The Israel stories were really hard for me to write, because I think that my book is very much about politics, but it isn't political. It really was important for me to not have a political agenda at all, because I have a hard time stomaching any political fiction that feels message-y.

If libertarianism were easy to explain, and it weren't easy to exaggerate the effects of libertarianism, I think it would have been done already. Many many very intelligent people have applied themselves to crafting an agenda that people could grab ahold of. But the problem of course is that libertarianism isn't political. It is kind of anti-political. It wants to take a lot of things out of the political arena.

If there are political programs on TV, yet it takes an artist to actually energize political debate, that tells you something really quite frightening about the level of the political debate happening on mainstream channels - right-wing-biased mothers.

I read at least one periodical every month by a political group I dislike - to keep some sense of balance. The overwhelming stupidity of political movements is caused by the fact that political types never read anything but their own gang's agit-prop.

Democracy, taken in its narrower, purely political, sense, suffers from the fact that those in economic and political power possess the means for molding public opinion to serve their own class interests. The democratic form of government in itself does not automatically solve problems; it offers, however, a useful framework for their solution. Everything depends ultimately on the political and moral qualities of the citizenry.

New information technologies-including email, the web, and computerized blast-faxes and phone calls-have fundamentally changed the landscape of political competition in modern democracies. They've done so in three ways: by dramatically boosting the access of individuals and special interests to politically potent information, by making it easier for such people to coordinate their activities and exert political power, and by greatly increasing the pace of events within our political systems.

Any time the negro becomes involved in mature political action, then the resistance of the politicians who benefit from the exploited political system as it now stands will be forced to put, exercise more violent action to deprive the negro of his mature political action.

The President appoints the U.S. Attorneys. They're political in a certain respect. But the Department of Justice - the power that they hold is so great, it's life and limb, you know - put you in jail, make you run up hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal costs. Even though we understand that political appointees take these jobs. We don't assume that the party in power is going to use that kind of power to advance its political interests.

Global warming is a political issue. It is as much a political issue to the left as abortion is. It's as big a political issue as health care is.

Politics is different than movies. Politics are controlled by leaders. Leaders of every country have different interests. And they try to explain to their people why they should take one side or the other side. But in the movie its doing the opposite. It allows you to have a Universal Experience. You don't watch it as politics but as a movie. You don't have different reactions all over. It's so universal a language. It's not a political language serving a political agenda. The language of cinema is a world language. With the Hollywood movie, it brings about the same reaction wherever it goes.

There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a politcal and moral action.

Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

Just me existing, as an openly black transgender woman from a working-class background, thriving, is a political act. My brother always reminds me that if you are black in America and you're alive, you deserve a round of applause. There are so many forces that don't want us to be alive, and so just being openly who I am, and happy and thriving, is a political act.

We also call upon the king to hand over power to the political parties and for the political parties to shoulder their responsibility and turn the people's demands for democracy and good governance into reality.

Political technology determines political success.

Men towering high above such political pygmies, men of refinement, of culture, of ability, are jeered into silence as mollycoddles. It is absurd to claim that ours is the era of individualism. Ours is merely a more poignant repetition of the phenomenon of all history: every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass. Today, as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed.

Up until, really, Roosevelt, African-Americans largely voted ninety per cent Republican. That was the political origins, that's what their political voice was in the Republican party. During that history, that last sixty or seventy years of history, the Republican party effectively walked away from the community. They were afraid to really embrace civil rights even though they embraced civil rights legislation. And so it's not enough to just to put it on paper, you gotta actually show up and be in the community, and understand what that struggle was really about.

In our society, real power does not happen to lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy: that’s where the decisions are made about what’s produced, how much is produced, what’s consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs, who controls the resources, and so on and so forth. And as long as that remains the case, changes inside the political system can make some difference-I don’t want to say it’s zero-but the differences are going to be very slight.

The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future.

every political structure, new or old, left to itself develops stabilizing forces which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion. Therefore all political bodies appear to be temporary obstacles when they are seen as part of an eternal stream of growing power.

When I write my novels, I'm not writing them to make political points. I'm writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I'm creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters.

All films are political, whether they mean to be or not. Star Wars is political. As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics. It's just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others.

I don't feel like I possess a particular political intelligence, and when I read work that does, I feel like somebody else is going to have the right political thing to say. As a citizen, I feel an enormous need to respond, and immediately post-election, I felt like, What is my work worth? Should I quit what I'm doing and go work on the 2018 election now? How is what I'm putting into the world meaningful?

What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope?

Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.

I don't think that what's going on in Bosnia is political activity. It's partly political, but it's partly atavistic as well.

The subject of contemporary art should include a political dimension, the distrust contemporary art has towards the existing order. One manifestation of this distrust is the mechanical dichotomization between art's form and its political content; the other is the institutionalizing tendency of anti-institutionalization. We almost never resist ourselves - the part of ourselves that has been institutionalized. We have occupied the word "resistance" and have become its owner, while "resistance" has become our servant. Thus, we own "resistance" and occupy it as a position of power.

Whats different now is that while political leaders used to give talking points to talk radio, now talk-radio hosts are giving talking points to political leaders. Its all part of the suffocating spin cycle were in. In media, politics and publishing, the conventional wisdom is to play to this base.

Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.

The problem is we have a Wall Street-to-Washington access of power that has controlled the political climate. The donor class feeds the political class who does the dance that the donor class wants. And the result is federal government keeps getting bigger.

Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.

[in 1998] I know my political ideas affect what I write but I've tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I've written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn't know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.

We see and realise that the political situation in the United States is influenced by those who have lost the elections but refuse to accept their defeat, and who continue to use the anti-Russia card and various allegations most actively in the political infighting. This is why we are in no hurry, we are ready to wait, yet we strongly hope that Russian-US relations will become normal again sometime in the future.

Many novelists say, "I'm not a political novelist" - myself included. That's a standard, even a default position. Whereas that divide between art and politics simply isn't possible in many countries. In Hungary, you couldn't be a fiction writer and then, when asked about politics, put your hands up in the air and say "But I'm not a political novelist." If you're a Chinese novelist, a novelist in a country where censorship is such an issue, how do you claim that politics has nothing to do with your writing? It's in your writing, it's shaping your words.

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.

The Conquest is not a film about Nicolas Sarkozy - it's a film about political conquest. It's a Shakespearean expression, where we have all the elements of a drama, both political and personal at the same time. The decors and the costumes are all based on real photos - I wanted to be as close to reality as possible. Nicola Piovani's theatrical music gives a distance that's almost Chaplinesque, there's something quite funny. There's no imitation, no caricature, no parodie - it's realism with a distance where the dialogues are often quite funny.

A judicial standard means that a judicious decision can be entirely correct, even when the result does not line up with our preferred political positions or cater to certain political interests.

To me, the housewife who puts her teacups unwashed in the sink because her husband won't wash them, is political. Every act is political: the things you do, as well as the things you omit doing; the things you refuse to do; the things you fail to do; the things you say, as well as the things you don't say.

I think China thinks information technology is less important than we think it is in the US, economically, and more important politically. And so Chinese internet companies are extremely political, they're protected behind the great firewall of China, and investment in Alibaba is good as long as Jack Ma stays in the good graces of the Chinese communist party. Alibaba is largely copying various business models from the US; they have combined some things in interesting new ways, but I think it's fundamentally a business that works because of the political protection you get in China.

In many European countries we have populist indirect democratic systems. The people elect, in a proportionate manner, a parliament. The parliament with all its parties is representative of the political opinions among the citizens. It is reasonable to claim that the people rule itself through the political institutions.

I think there is no doubt that the advent of 24/7 news channels, which are voracious in their demand for constant new content, has accelerated the political process. The rise of social media, in addition to talkback, I think has intensified the political process.

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

Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry.

By their subjugation of the press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political blessings -- Gyges' ring of invisibility. And they have left the American people more deeply baffled by their own country's politics than any people on earth. Our public realm lies steeped in twilight, and we call that twilight news.'

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

My personal political convictions are rooted in the populist political traditions of western Canada.

Work can be undertaken to create an authentic independent political party, a real party, based on popular participation from the ground up, not a top-down candidate producing organization like the two official parties, working from school boards to state legislatures and beyond. Not easy in the regressive U.S. political system, but not impossible.