Quotes About Politics

Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.

If you look at social movements in Latin America, there are spaces where alternative politics are thought about on the ground, at the grassroots level, but they are always under threat. The problem in North Africa and the Middle East is the politics of oil. It means that the spaces for truly grassroots politics, involving those masses of people excluded from high politics, are very quickly closed down. They are not really allowed any kind of autonomy to develop, and that seems to be the real problem, which gets us back to the neo-colonial relationship.

I believe people who go into politics want to do the right thing. And then they hit a big wall of re-election and the pettiness of politics. In the end, politics gets in the way of the business of people.

You can't afford to hate politics. The politics of this country is democracy. Democracy is by the people, of the people and for the people. The day people stop taking active part in the politics of this country, democracy will not survive.

I went into the foreign service because I was interested in politics. But, in 1991, when I joined, I didn't see much of an opportunity to be involved in federal politics as a Conservative. We were at the tail end of the Brian Mulroney era. I wanted to do something non-partisan as a way of preparing for a role in our politics later.

The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.

I think if you're going to make political art, you have to engage at some level. You can't just write about politics, you have to try and be politics as well.

An independent is the guy who wants to take the politics out of politics.

When we win on an issue we call it leadership. When we lose, we call it politics. Practicing politics simply means increasing your options for effective results.

They want politics and think it will save them. At best, it gives direction to their numbed desires. But there is no politics but the manipulation of power through language. Thus the latter’s constant debasement.

Politics deserves much praise. Politics is a preoccupation of free men, and its existence is a test of freedom. The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.

She didn't know a lot about politics – yet – but she'd learned enough in her history classes to know politics could always be counted on to make a bad situation worse.

Politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related. We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect, and our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they're sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order to survive.

Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.

Identity politics divides us. Fiction connects. One is interested in sweeping generalizations. The other, in nuances. One draws boundaries. The other recognizes no frontiers. Identity politics is made of solid bricks. Fiction is flowing water.

All I know is politics. Really, politics takes up most of my time; it's nonstop.

The real difference between relationship politics and transactional politics is loyalty. [Barack] Obama doesn't seem to expect it.

If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself.

The degree to which I try to be honest that there's some Donald Trump in all of us. The seduction of the promise of order, the politics of white fear, it's not just some other group of uneducated white people who are susceptible to those appeals. It's everyone. And not just white people, frankly. All Americans have this susceptibility to a politics of fear and order that I think we have to be really honest about.

The mixing of politics and business not only is detrimental to politics, as is frequently observed, but even much more so to business.

No. I probably do better not being in politics. They have too much control over you when you are in politics.

People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby.

It was the South African Government that has introduced politics into sport by decreeing politically that no non-white person will represent their country. They introduced politics into sport." And Don [Bradman] was a very shrewd old bloke, and he looked at me for about thirty seconds and then he said, "Bob, I've got no answer to that." And that was it.

When you're talking with a person at this level of the government, at the very highest level, I think you have to be very discreet because he, President Clinton, is very aware that anything he says publicly can have a profound impact on American politics and on world politics.

There are a lot of things going on in politics at the moment which means that people can't concentrate on politicians' personalities and the characters of those who are actually running this country. This can overcome what politics is about.

I don't have an opinion about whether or not politics should appear more in fiction or not, generally. I think politics are a part of life, but a part of life that most people don't think about very much, most of the time. Or, people think about it superficially and they talk about it superficially because they don't know very much.

My father always would say, "My daughter will go into politics? My daughter will become prime minister", but it's not what I wanted to do. I would say, "No, Papa, I will never go into politics." As I've said before, this is not the life I chose; it chose me ... But I accepted the responsibility and I've never wavered in my commitment.

I'll always put policy ahead of politics and I think people expect that. They're sick of the politics getting in the way of decent outcomes for people.

I probably do better not being in politics. They have too much control over you when you are in politics.

I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics.

We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics.

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933... Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

I have many, many old friends, and I always think that it`s important, when you get into politics, to have friends you had before you were in politics and to understand what`s on their minds.

In the very near future, and I stress this important point, it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.

If you are going to stick to the truth then you need to keep your distance from the Chinese government and indeed to any form of politics, including the politics of democratic countries.

My politics, and my religion as well, are based entirely on the loveliness and value of ordinary human lives. The creaky apparatus called politics shelters or oppresses or threatens these lives, and is therefore of interest.

Trump believes politics is a staged fight. But it is not. Still, clear words are sometimes needed in politics. In that sense, I believe I am better than Mrs. Merkel.

A lot of politics plays at the level of myth, and if you understand that, then you feel like you have access to the secret language of politics. People respond to political characters in archetypal ways. A fun game is to think of a politician and ask, "Which god is that? Are they like Aries? Are they like Athena?".

Dalai Lama is transforming those criteria - and the whole way of conducting politics. He's conducting politics in a much deeper way than most politicians are able to. He's the only politician I know of who's a monk. The Pope, of course, is in a similar position, but the Pope isn't in the same way leading a country of many million people.

Politics is the only serious. subject that men think themselves qualified to act upon without any previous education or instruction whatever. If it happened to be astronomy, or botany, or medicine, or law, he would never be allowed to work in any of these arts, or to take a decisive part in the history of any one of these sciences without having, at least, acquired: the A B C of it; but the awful fact of politics is that we do not take the trouble seriously to understand the political situation.

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’ . . . We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. . . . The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

In the early 1990s, I briefly got involved in Italian politics. But that intermezzo lasted just two years and had little success. I also found politics emotionally empty.

It almost seems like anyone who doesn't seem political in any way is at an advantage. It's almost like anti-politics. A stage where anyone who acts - and it is an act - as if they have nothing to do with the way that daily politics works is lauded as some kind of superstar human being.

One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.

It was easy to make fun of Bush, but it was sort of like shooting fish in a barrel and it didn't really feel all that good because it was so easy to do. I would much rather live under a thoughtful president. Even if it makes it harder to be funny about politics, it makes it more interesting to be funny about politics.

Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.

Each discipline has the capacity to be interested in politics, and each would ask different questions of what politics is, what constitutes power, how power is maintained, how it circulates, how relationships are formed, how institutions are built, how they fall. Every discipline would answer those questions in different ways.

The only way to get money out of politics is to get politics out of money-making.