Political Thought Quotes

#1. Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx. #Quote by Hannah Arendt

#2. It is not self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and intoxicating romanticism which induces us to turn with passionate interest, with unqualified willingness to learn, toward the political thought of classical antiquity. We are impelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West. #Quote by Leo Strauss

#3. If i were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism #Quote by J.M. Coetzee

#4. Identities are the key to political thought and action. IF cultural creators can frame their message so it resonates with a frame that the audience already possesses, they are more likely to persuade that audience to "buy" the message. Political propaganda operates this way quite overtly. #Quote by Wendy Griswold

#5. Orwell's 1984 [ ... ] is political thought disguised as a novel; the thinking is certainly lucid and correct, but it is distorted by its guise as a novel, which renders it imprecise and vague. [ ... ] the situations and the characters are as flat as a poster.
The pernicious influence of Orwell's novel resides in its implacable reduction of a reality to its political dimension alone, and in its reduction of that dimension to what is exemplarily negative about it. I refuse to forgive this reduction on the grounds that it was useful as propaganda in the struggle against totalitarian evil. For that evil is, precisely, the reduction of life to politics and of politics to propaganda. So despite its intentions, Orwell's novel itself joins in the totalitarian spirit, the spirit of propaganda. It reduces (and teaches others to reduce) the life of a hated society to the simple listing of its crimes. #Quote by Milan Kundera

#6. Nichts kommt von selbst. Und nur wenig ist von Dauer. Darum - besinnt Euch auf Eure Kraft und darauf, dass jede Zeit eigene Antworten will und man auf ihrer Höhe zu sein hat, wenn Gutes bewirkt werden soll."

("Nothing happens automatically. And only few things last. Therefore - be mindful of your strength, and of the fact that every era wants its own answers, and you have to be up to its speed in order to be able to do good.")

Message to the Socialist International Congress in Berlin, September 15, 1992 #Quote by Willy Brandt

#7. I am interested in politics but have stayed away from writing overtly political songs, or message songs, because I find it difficult to discuss politics intelligently in a 4-minute song. But I am finding there are ways to get bits and pieces of political thought across without preaching that the people have the power or we shall not be moved. Of course these sentiments have their place too - I'm not knocking Phil Ochs - but that's a different kind of music, songs to play at rallies, not to achieve a state of bliss. #Quote by Dean Wareham

#8. Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. ... The more people's standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion. #Quote by Hannah Arendt

#9. An accessible introduction to the nature of political thought. Just what I always wanted. #Quote by Chris Weitz

#10. Evsei Slonim would have seen himself as a member of the intelligentsia, a classless class whose features Nabokov described as""the spirit of self-sacrifice, intense participation in political causes or political thought, intense sympathy for the underdog of any nationality, fanatical integrity, tragic inability to sink to compromise, true spirit of international responsibility. #Quote by Stacy Schiff

#11. Fear-addled minds swarm around conspiracies like flies around something foul. #Quote by Raul Ramos Y Sanchez

#12. When we fall into the trap of ethnicization and collective responsibility, we collude with Nazi and Soviet propagandists in the abolition of political thought and the lifting of individual agency. What #Quote by Timothy Snyder

#13. Each party has a platform
a pre-fixed menu of beliefs making up its worldview. The candidate can choose one of the two platforms, but remember: no substitutions.
For example, do you support healthcare? Then you must also want a ban on assault weapons. Pro limited government? Congratulations, you are also anti-abortion.
Luckily, all human opinion falls neatly into one of the two clearly defined camps. Thus, the two-party system elegantly represents the bi-chromatic rainbow that is American political thought. #Quote by Jon Stewart

#14. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. #Quote by George Orwell

#15. One of the great virtues of Confucianism was its suppleness. Western political thought tended to be rather brittle; as soon as the state became corrupt, everything ceased to make sense. Confucianism always retained its equilibrium, like a cork that could float as well in spring water or raw sewage. #Quote by Neal Stephenson

#16. For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual's interests. #Quote by John Carroll

#17. It is worth noting the qualities this historian ascribes to them: they were fearless, high-principled, deeply versed in ancient and modern political thought, astute and pragmatic, unafraid of experiment, and - this is significant - convinced of man's power to improve his condition through the use of intelligence. #Quote by Barbara W. Tuchman

#18. The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive. #Quote by George Orwell

#19. That the religious right completely took over the word Christian is a given. At one time, phrases such as Christian charity and Christian tolerance were used to denote kindness and compassion. To perform a "Christian" act meant an act of giving, of acceptance, of toleration. Now, Christian is invariably linked to right-wing conservative political thought
Christian nation, Christian morality, Christian values, Christian family. #Quote by Peter McWilliams

#20. If, however, the success of a politician is to be measured by the degree in which he is able personally to influence the course of politics, and attach to himself a school of political thought, then Mr. Mill, in the best meaning of the words, has succeeded. #Quote by Millicent Fawcett

#21. The decisive factor for the future of Europe - and before all things, for the 'restoration' of Europe - will be whether political thought and national feelings are influenced by the reality of internationalism. #Quote by Ellen Key

#22. Political thought in France is either nostalgic or Utopian. #Quote by Raymond Aron

#23. By what incomprehensible mechanism are our organs held in subjection to sentiment and thought? How is it that a single melancholy idea shall disturb the whole course of the blood; and that the blood should in turn communicate irregularities to the human understanding? What is that unknown fluid which certainly exists and which, quicker and more active than light, flies in less than the twinkling of an eye into all the channels of life, - produces sensations, memory, joy or grief, reason or frenzy, - recalls with horror what we would choose to forget; and renders a thinking animal, either a subject of admiration, or an object of pity and compassion? #Quote by Voltaire

#24. My life in this pit will soon enter its fifth year. For more than forty-two months, I have thought hate, have lain down with hate in my heart, have dreamed hate and awakened with hate. I suffocate in the knowledge that I am the prisoner of a horde of vicious apes, and I rack my brain over the perpetual riddle of how this same people which so jealously watched over its rights a few years ago can have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only allows itself to be dominated by the street-corner idlers of yesterday, but actually, height of shame, is incapable any longer of perceiving its shame for the shame that it is. #Quote by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen

#25. For a man's counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. #Quote by Pericles

#26. No one has ever thought this: Now that I'm out of therapy and have fixed my mental problems, I think I want to be a ventriloquist. #Quote by Dana Gould

#27. God, thought Ross, it does work, and unfairly; but I want her, not any other, not the most beautiful eighteen-year-old damsel born out of a sea-shell, not the most seductive houri of any sultan's harem; I want her with her familiar gestures and her shining smile and her scarred knees, and I know she wants me in just the same way, and if there's any happiness more complete than this I don't know it and am not sure I even want it. #Quote by Winston Graham

#28. But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. #Quote by Oscar Wilde

#29. One of the elders told him that when he was a boy his grandfather came to him one day and said he had two wolves fighting inside him. One was gray, the other black. The gray one wanted his grandfather to be courageous, and patient, and kind. The other, the black one, wanted his grandfather to be fearful and cruel. This upset the boy, and he thought about it for a few days then returned to his grandfather. He asked, 'Grandfather, which of the wolves will win?'
The abbot smiled slightly and examined the Chief Inspector. 'Do you know what his grandfather said?'
Gamache shook his head ...
'The one I feed,' said Dom Philippe. #Quote by Louise Penny

#30. I was on the street. This guy waved to me, and he came up to me and said, 'I'm sorry, I thought you were someone else.' And I said, 'I am. #Quote by Demetri Martin

#31. When I was Mare Barrow of the Stilts, I thought the same way. I wondered what would happen if I survived conscription, and saw what that future held. A friendly marriage to the fish boy with green eyes, children we could love, a poor stilt home. It seemed like a dream back then, an impossibility. And it still is. It always will be. I do not love Kilorn, not the way he wants me to. I never will. #Quote by Victoria Aveyard

#32. Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything. #Quote by Zadie Smith

#33. A little maybe; I've been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn't listen. Every time you said, 'Farm Boy do this' you thought I was answering 'As you wish' but that's only because you were hearing wrong. 'I love you' was what it was, but you never heard, and you never heard.' ~ Westley #Quote by William Goldman

#34. I see us as all sitting around naked, shivering, in a huge circle, looking up as the sky turns black and the stars flare out and somebody starts to tell a story, claims to see a pattern in the stars. And then someone else tells a story about the eye of the hurricane, the eye of the tiger. And the stories , the images, become the truth and we will kill each other rather than change one word of the story. But every once in a while, someone sees a new star, or claims to see it, a star in the north that changes the pattern, and that is devastating. People are outraged, they start up grunting in fury, they turn on the one who noticed it and club her to death. They sit back down, muttering. They take up smoking. They turn away from the north, not wanting it to be thought that they might be trying to catch sight of her hallucination. Some of them, however, are true believers, they can look straight north and never see even a glimpse of what she pointed to. The foresighted gather together and whisper. They already know that if that star is accepted, all the stories will have to be changed. They turn suspiciously to sniff out any of the others who might surreptitiously turn their heads to peer at the spot where this star is supposed to be. They catch a few they think are doing this; despite their protests, they are killed. The things must be stopped at the root. But the elders have to keep watching, and their watching convinces the others that there's really something there, so more a #Quote by Marilyn French

#35. There was a second scream then, from the mountains. From the Blueblood Matron, screaming for her daughter as she plummeted down to the rocks below. The other Bluebloods whirled, but they were too far away, their wyverns too slow to stop that fatal plunge.
But Abraxos was not.
And Manon didn't know if she gave the command or thought it, but that scream, that mother's scream she'd never heard before, made her lean in. Abraxos dove, a shooting star with his glistening wings.
They dove and dove, for the broken wyvern and the still-living witch upon it. #Quote by Sarah J. Maas

#36. Christianity enhanced the notion of political and social accountability by providing a new model: that of servant leadership. In ancient Greece and Rome no one would have dreamed of considering political leaders anyone's servants. The job of the leader was to lead. But Christ invented the notion that the way to lead is by serving the needs of others, especially those who are the most needy. #Quote by Dinesh D'Souza

#37. Would he love the house as much if his cat burglar didn't come back for the painting? He pushed that thought away, telling himself he was in the market for a house long before he'd laid eyes on the dark-clad figure running along the rooftop. Long before the kiss. #Quote by B. J. Daniels

#38. Then Rin was hugging him. Relief and joy swelled inside her till she thought she would burst.
"Uh ... ," Razo said, patting her head as if she might be crazy.
"You were dead," she mumbled against his chest.
"I was? Well, I wish someone had told me. Would've been nice to relax on my back for a while. Um, how'd I die? #Quote by Shannon Hale

#39. I wanted to make a film about anorexia. I thought about it for a long time, but then gave up on this idea as I felt that this theme would be so hermetic and closed that it would not reach an audience. However, the plot about the character of Olga and the idea that a body has a lot of different meanings were still present in my mind. #Quote by Malgorzata Szumowska

#40. I do think sometimes when scrolling through the TV and there's something on and I look at it and I think oh, my god. I thought I was fat? What is my problem? #Quote by Meryl Streep

#41. Freedom first, he thought, home second, revenge third. #Quote by G.R. Matthews

#42. I'm a different person. I don't want to be titled as Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain's daughter. I want to be thought of as Frances Cobain. #Quote by Frances Bean Cobain

#43. Privacy was a luxury slaves didn't deserve, or so most Valorians had thought…to their undoing, since forcing their slaves to sleep and eat together in one collective space had helped them plot against their conquerors. It amazed Kestrel, how people set their own traps.
She remembered that kiss in the carriage on Firstwinter night. How her whole being had begged for it.
She had baited her own trap, too. #Quote by Marie Rutkoski

#44. The intellectual is not defined by professional group and type of occupation. Nor are good upbringing and a good family enough in themselves to produce an intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interest in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is nonimitative. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#45. A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity ... and therefore I think that it's, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent. #Quote by Noam Chomsky

#46. A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness. #Quote by Natalie Clifford Barney

#47. For I have trained myself and am training myself always to be able to dance lightly in the service of thought #Quote by Soren Kierkegaard

#48. It is a source of endless wonder that these two islands lying side by side off the coast of Europe should have been the fount of so much anguish, each for the other. One spawned the mightiest empire in history, and its arrogant overlords were loathed by their oppressed neighbors across the Irish sea. The other -- small, poor, with virtually no valuable natural resources -- supported a people conspicuously lacking in political gifts and afflicted with an extraordinary incidence of alcoholism. "It is a very moist climate," Churchill once observed. Yet endowed with immense charm, romantic vision, and remarkable genius, it was the homeland of Swift, Shore, Yeats, Joyce, Millington Synge, O'Casey, O'Faolain, and Dublin's Abbey Theater. #Quote by William Manchester

#49. As you create authentic power, you discover that the people in your life whom you thought were your enemies are not really enemies from the point of view of your soul. From the point of view of your soul, they are your friends or you would not be together at all. #Quote by Gary Zukav

#50. Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels' recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche's ghostly script? #Quote by Glen Duncan

#51. What is called zazen is sitting on a zafu [pillow] in a quiet room, absolutely still, in the exact and proper position and without uttering a word, the mind empty of any thought, good or wicked. It is continuing to sit peacefully, facing a wall, and nothing more. Every day. #Quote by Taisen Deshimaru

#52. I was in a place I had never visited before and I didn't want to ever visit again.
I was in hell, or so I thought… #Quote by J.K. Ellem

#53. At least you are mine! Soon – in a few months, perhaps, my angel will sleep in my arms, will awaken in my arms, will live there. All your thought at all moments, all your looks will be for me; all my thought, all my moments, all my looks will be for you! #Quote by Victor Hugo

#54. What drew me to politics in the first place was the fact that I wanted to have a place to take a stand and use my voice to express what I believed in. But I've no longer got any political aspirations. I feel that as a politician, fifty per cent of people would hate you before you even left the house. #Quote by Jon Bon Jovi

#55. If I thought that I could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of Christendom, I should praise them, but it tasks me too much. They seem to be the most civil and humane, but I may be mistaken. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#56. it was clear that true freedom meant not just the ability to vote or choose one's own political representatives, but the ability to build one's own schools, to have accessible health care and jobs, to have clean air and water and energy in the control of the communities that utilize them. Of course, true freedom and independence also includes a free and fair judicial system, with responsible and accountable policing, fair legal process, and reasoned judgment and sentencing. #Quote by Oscar Lopez Rivera

#57. When I was put up in posh hotels, I thought it was wonderful. #Quote by Cilla Black

#58. The Mexicans have a fervent appreciation of poetry and make regular use of it. It occupies a high and ancient seat in the Mexican culture. The Aztecs called it "a scattering of jades," jade being what they valued most, far more than the gold for which they were murdered in great numbers by invading Spaniards. They felt that the more profound aspects of certain concepts, whether emotional, philosophical, political, or artistic, could be expressed only in poetry. #Quote by Linda Ronstadt

#59. I just write all the time. In my whole life I've never had what I've heard people talk about writer's block. I've never had that. Life is like a song to me. I just hear everything in music, so I have never once thought "Well, I'm never gonna be able to write again." I've got thousands of songs. #Quote by Dolly Parton

#60. Someone told me once that the light we see from them is hundreds of thousands of years old. That the star could already be dead and we'd never know it because it still looked alive. I thought that was a terrible thing. That the stars could lie. #Quote by T.J. Klune

#61. One of our most important tasks will be to save future generations from a similar political fate and to maintain for ever watchful in them a knowledge of the menace of Jewry. For this reason alone it is vital that the Passion play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry. #Quote by Adolf Hitler

#62. I love collaboration. I love working with people to come up with something better than what I initially thought. With directing, you have to be controlling in a lot of ways, but I find myself trying to battle against that, to not be controlling, because that's when great things can come about, beyond how great you think you can be. #Quote by Joe Hahn