Quotes About Politics

In terms of talking about what our politics has become, it now seems as if Barack Obama is starting to stand outside of it a little bit and critique what our politics has become. And I think he sees himself as a useful critic that way saying that it's not only become dishonest, he said, but now we have a selective sorting of the facts and our politics has become self-defeating.

The United States Constitution builds politics right into the process of selecting federal judges. This third branch, the judiciary, is designed to have a longer view. To have individuals who are more insulated from politics. They're not elected directly. They're appointed for life. So, politics enters, but it's also, controlled. And if you bypass this process, I'm not sure what we do.

I full well realize that politics is a rough and tumble business, but politics should not be reduced to lobbing partisan hand grenades. Politics is not war. Terrorism is.

The issue of the American justice system is so much broader than any one party, or any area of the country, or any one policy, because the totality of it is that it's driven by the underlying politics. The underlying politics are white fear and wrath and punishment. And that's what tends to be consistent. As I say in the book, that's the magnet that's drawing the iron filings into alignment. That's the thing that's powering all of it. The gravitational pole of those politics operate on each of these disparate little actors.

I've been worked over by the English press because there's an assumption that my politics are identical with my wife's, and for that matter that my wife's politics are identical with her politics of 20 years ago.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.

One of the real dilemmas we have in our country and around the world is that what works in politics is organization and conflict. That is, drawing the sharp distinctions. But in real life, what works is networks and cooperation. And we need victories in real life, so we've got to get back to networks and cooperation, not just conflict. But politics has always been about conflict, and in the coverage of politics, information dissemination tends to be organized around conflict as well.

The time has come that Christians must vote for honest men and take consistent ground in politics or the Lord will curse them. . . . Christians have been exceedingly guilty in this matter. But the time has come when they must act differently. . . . Christians seem to act as if they thought God did not see what they do in politics. But I tell you He does see it - and He will bless or curse this nation according to the course they Christians take in politics.

I call it people-to-people politics and thats what politics should be about, reaching out and helping one another and touching one another about what were going to do.

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.

Course, that's the trouble with politics, it breeds politics! So that makes it pretty hard to stamp out.

Feminism catches fire when it draws upon its inherent spirituality. When it does not, it is just one more form of politics, and politics never fed our deepest hungers.

People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

I see a huge, huge divide between the people who are facing the most barriers and violence and the kinds of stories being told in mainstream American politics. The issues that I think most about - how many people's lives are being affected by prisons and policing, how many people's lives are being affected by immigration enforcement and deportation - those stories aren't being touched, let alone told, in mainstream politics.

What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what's going on in your own community.

The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.

Aeschylus and Plato are remembered today long after the triumphs of Imperial Athens are gone. Dante outlived the ambitions of thirteenth century Florence. Goethe stands serenely above the politics of Germany, and I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over cities, we too will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.

Politics is all about getting and keeping power, and in politics, the professionals in the business soon learn that the only way to get and keep power is to force people to talk to them. A full-time legislature thinks of more and more things to regulate and discuss.

Politics is not really politics any more. It is run, for the most part, by Madison Avenue advertising firms, who sell politicians to the public the way they sell bars of soap or cans of beer.

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.

Yet in a society of conflicting interests the only democratic way in which matters can be improved is through politics, and politics means the compromising of extremes in order to achieve that notorious half loaf which the passionate and the outraged never find sufficient.

The fact that you couldn't see Alfred Hitchcock's first film The Mountain Eagle, or that you couldn't see so many of F.W. Murnau's masterpieces, or that you couldn't see so many of Oscar Micheaux's really intriguing race melodramas, made with fierce independent spirit against all odds in '20s and '30s America. That stuff haunted me. They really did bring to life a sense of 20th Century history: cultural history, pop history, gender politics and race politics, socio economic history, all that stuff. It was bracing and instructive.

Politics itself is so unsexy, isn't it? But when the politics in creative works are really explored - not used as a vehicle - the results can be really interesting.

We are not in politics to ignore peoples' worries, we are in politics to deal with them.

Politics is not a baseball game with winners or losers. What politics is about is whether we protect the needs of millions of people in this country who are hurting.

I can't define myself as a political writer - I don't think I've earned it, and I don't function as a political writer in the way that many of the writers I admire do. It's not simply a question of context, of where I'm writing from - there is much in American society that urgently needs to be written about. I think your work is always engaged with politics in the looser sense of the word - and that looseness is itself a kind of privilege - because politics and culture are evidently intertwined.

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.

It is more important for Labour to raise the reputation of politics than for the Tories, who are only in politics for the money.

What we do now, on the other hand...Don't think that I'm crazy about this kind of politics. It's no accident that I've done everything to keep my sons out of it, and so far I've succeeded. After independence I retired immediately from politics.

Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

I'm kind of conscious and aware of how ridiculous everyone involved with politics or talking about politics, especially on television, is - all the shouting matches and the screaming and the over-the-top personalities, and everyone's just playing. It's like WWF for news, almost. It's really ridiculous and I really don't want to be a part of it, and I'm not trying to put on this persona of this angry revolutionary to get people to follow me.

There's lots about politics I don't feel comfortable with. To talk about the politics of future ideas is impossible in soundbite form.

We understood that politics is nothing but war without bloodshed and war is nothing but politics with bloodshed.

Well, it's always, though, safer in politics to avoid risk, to just kind of go along with the status quo. But I didn't get into government to do the safe and easy things. A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not why the ship is built. Politics isn't just a game of competing interests and clashing parties. The people of America expect us to seek public office and to serve for the right reasons. And the right reason is to challenge the status quo and to serve the common good.

Television's compelling power is its immediacy . .. this immediacy feeds the politics of emotions, gut reactions and impressions rather than the politics of logic, facts and reason; it emphasizes personality rather than issues.

The fact is that there's hundreds of thousands of incredibly motivated, active political partisans working on the blogs. These people generate buzz, it generates local activism. These aren't the kind of people that pay attention a little to politics, turn it off and then do something else. They live and breathe politics. And anybody that wants to build a movement or a successful campaign needs people like the people who read blogs.

I've always looked upon politics as a very boring thing. Politics never interested me as much as the people involved in it.

If you take the conflicts we are used to dealing with, race over the years in America, and you combine that with the desire or aspiration to political power or taking power from other people, which is what politics is all about, you end up with a lot more friction than you would normally see with just straight-ahead politics.

It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme.

There's a couple things you don't talk about in life, and that's race, religion and politics. I try to make sure I don't talk about politics at all.

I think politics can no longer be assigned to parliamentary activity and it probably never could be. But politics with a small p and the history of trade union movement really interests me.

I think Barack Obama has brought a new level of ethical standards to Washington. Has he changed some basic hard-knuckle politics? No. You need hard-knuckle politics to succeed.

I am not averse to politics, but that does not mean that I am going to join politics.

Politics has got its own rules and boundaries, and the daily narrative and the conventions. And if everybody in it concludes that Trump equals reprobate, Trump is a sleaze, Trump's... If you don't flow with it - if you don't at least admit to the premise first and then try to, you know, qualify yourself - you're dead in that world. It's a follow-me world, politics is, and the left runs it, and there are just certain things that you have to accept.

Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.

I am only concerned with politics so I may see the day when I don't have to be concerned with politics.