“What is more comforting to the terrorists around the world: the failure to pass the 9/11 legislation because we lacked 'a majority of the majority,' or putting aside partisan politics to enact tough new legislation with America's security foremost in mind?”
Topic
politics
953 quotes
Quotes, most loved first
“Politics is an act of faith you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public.”
“The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.”
“While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing - good for our political culture.”
“In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.”
“The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly a matter of politics rather than faith.”
“Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.”
“I know I'm not supposed to have any opinions about politics, because I'm famous.”
“Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.”
“It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself.”
“Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully - love, lust, longing joy, rage, fear triumph, yearning and confusion.”
“Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.”
“Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.”
“There's not a single chef I know of that does not think about the politics of the food they're serving.”
“A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.”
“Freedom isn't free. It shouldn't be a bragging point that 'Oh, I don't get involved in politics,' as if that makes someone cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn't insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable.”
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
“Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.”
“Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.”
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
“I can remember when Democrats believed that it was the duty of America to fight for freedom over tyranny.”
“There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word 'freedom' that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all.”
“Those who write the editorials and those who write the columns, they simply are unaccountable. They're free to impose their cultural politics in the name of freedom of the press.”
“Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. 'Don't bother us with politics', respond those who don't want to learn.”