c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
— P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quaran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience of their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that "Islam is peace and tolerance.
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.
— Henry A. Wallace
If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.
— Joseph Sobran
A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.(pg. 63, "Racism and the Economy")
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country.
— Robert F. Kennedy
Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
— Jean Baudrillard
members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desparately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots...One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion... All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet pp89-90
— Richard M. Rorty
Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.
— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round forhim. 'I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that SEEMSto be done right--though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly justnow--and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four dayswhen you might get un-birthday presents--'Certainly,' said Alice.And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't--till I tellyou. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.When _I_ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'itmeans just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so manydifferent things.'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master--that'sall.
— Lewis Carroll
The Delores tank rolled on inexorably, “You get a mortgage to buy a house, a larger mortgage than the previous owner because the price of the house has been artificially increased by the market, which is controlled by the banks. Then you live in the house for a few years paying a lot more in mortgage payments than you would if you were renting a similar property. But hey, you ‘own’ it and can ‘do things to it’… things that cost even more money, by the way… so you maintain its upkeep, improve it with say a new kitchen or bathroom; the more salubrious the neighbourhood the more expensive the kitchen would need to be – a Küche & Cucina, say; impressing your cleaner is very important after all and at the end you sell it to someone else for more than you paid for it so they’ll need an even bigger mortgage. And all the while everyone is paying all this money to the banks and the banks give the money to their shareholders, the biggest of whom are the incredibly rich. This, when you boil it all down, means that you’re taking a large sum out of your wages and passing it across to some rich person to live large, whilst you and others like you struggle to make their monthly payments. Basically you’ve been screwed, Doc, but somehow they’ve convinced you that you own a bit of England, when the truth is you don’t really own anything, you’re just renting it at a higher cost and they can take it back from you any time they want. It’s all just a card trick, Doc. All just ‘smoke and mirrors’ and that’s what’s getting to me.
— Arun D. Ellis, Corpalism
Americans, though apparently impressed by ghastly sentimentality and outrageous hypocrisy, are by nature much more politically cynical than Canadians. In their longer history they have had much more to be cynical about. They demand a vulgar show, enjoy it, guffaw, and forget it the next morning. When a new U.S. President takes office all bets are off and his campaign platform is dismantled and stored away. 
— Gordon Donaldson, Eighteen Men: The Prime Ministers Of Canada
Tolerance is love sick with the sickness of haughtiness.
— Kahlil Gibran
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
— Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right
Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
— Edward Abbey
They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping or in the keeping of her God the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship or not to worship that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality of all to prevent the few from governing the many and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, Individuality From 'The Gods and Other Lectures'
We had a choice between Democrats who couldn't learn from the past and Republicans who couldn't stop living in it...
— P.J. O'Rourke
I walked up to Griz and poked him in the chest. "Let me make this perfectly clear to you. Though some might seek to make it appear otherwise, I am not a bride to be bartered away to another kingdom, not a prize of war, not a mouthpiece for your Komizar. I am not a chip in a card game to be mindlessly tossed into the center of the pot, nor one to be kept in the tight fist of a greedy opponent. I am a player seated at the table alongside everyone else, and from this day forward, I will play my own hand as I see fit. Do you understand me? Because the consequences could be ugly if someone thought otherwise.
— Mary E. Pearson, The Heart of Betrayal
The line it is drawnThe curse it is castThe slow one nowWill later be fastAs the present nowWill later be pastThe new order isRapidly fadin'.And the first one nowWill later be lastFor the times they are a-changin'.
— Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1
What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.
— Christopher Hitchens
Today’s events are reminiscent of the Old Testament story of how the Israelites demanded a king over God’s objection. They believed that a king would give them peace and security. The results proved otherwise.
— Ron Paul, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom
Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.
— Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
— Gore Vidal
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.
— Donna J. Haraway
I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me.
— Arnold Schwarzenegger
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.
— Mort Sahl
The staunchest conservatives advocate a range of changes which differ in specifics, rather than in number or magnitude, from the changes advocated by those considered liberal…change, as such, is simply not a controversial issue. Yet a common practice among the anointed is to declare themselves emphatically, piously, and defiantly in favor of 'change.' Thus those who oppose their particular changes are depicted as being against change in general. It is as if opponents of the equation 2+2=7 were depicted as being against mathematics. Such a tactic might, however, be more politically effective than trying to defend the equation on its own merits. 
— Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
My life needs editing. 
— Mort Sahl
Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.
— Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
It is the moral duty of every US voter to guarantee that Barack Hussein Obama is a one-term president.
— Michelle Templet
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
— Toni Morrison
Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant "existing things" does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like “woman,” “butch,” “lesbian,” or “transsexual” are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism.
— Gayle S. Rubin
Republicans are men of narrow vision, who are afraid of the future.
— Jimmy Carter
Senator John Kyle claiming that over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion.Stephen Colbert: Over 90 percent, that is unbelievable...in that it is not true. Only 3 percent of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion. Kyle just rounded it up to the nearest 90.
— Stephen Colbert
Voting is not a right. It is a method used to determine which politician was most able to brainwash you.
— Dennis E. Adonis
The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behavior reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.
— Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith
And I reminded myself that a woman should be able to dress as she liked without a man hurting her...
— Stephanie Dray, Song of the Nile
The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game.
— Orhan Pamuk, Snow
In all ages the people have honored those who dishonored them. They have worshiped their destroyers; they have canonized the most gigantic liars, and buried the great thieves in marble and gold. Under the loftiest monuments sleeps the dust of murder.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, Humboldt From 'The Gods and Other Lectures'
For most of my life, I would have automatically said that I would opt for conscientious objector status, and in general, I still would. But the spirit of the question is would I ever, and there are instances where I might. If immediate intervention would have circumvented the genocide in Rwanda or stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur, would I choose pacifism? Of course not. Scott Simon, the reporter for National Public Radio and a committed lifelong Quaker, has written that it took looking into mass graves in former Yugoslavia to convince him that force is sometimes the only option to deter our species' murderous imp
— David Rakoff, Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems
The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.
— Jonah Goldberg
I am at liberty to vote as my conscience and judgment dictates to be right, without the yoke of any party on me... Look at my arms, you will find no party hand-cuff on them. 
— David Crockett
Come senators, congressmenPlease heed the callDon't stand in the doorwayDon't block up the hallFor he that gets hurtWill be he who has stalledThere's a battle outside ragin'.It'll soon shake your windowsAnd rattle your wallsFor the times they are a-changin'.
— Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1
Politics is just show business for ugly people.
— Jay Leno
Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.
— Tacitus, Annals
Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
— Carl Schmitt
I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.
— Benjamin Disraeli
In most of my campaigns, I find it is best not to mention my opponent by name because, by doing so, it just gives him a chance to get into the headlines.
— Harry Truman
Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.
— Richard Armour
If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first. 
— Oscar Wilde
From the people who brought you "zero tolerance," I present the Gun-Free Zone! Yippee! Problem solved! Bam! Bam! Everybody down! Hey, how did that deranged loner get a gun into this Gun-Free Zone?
— Ann Coulter
They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
There is nothing political about American literature.
— Laura Bush
Could the straggling thoughts of individuals be collected, they would frequently form materials for wise and able men to improve into useful matter.
— Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a Republican. But I repeat myself.
— Harry Truman
If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States.
— Henry A. Wallace
Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.
— Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.
— Max Weber
Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay atten
— Molly Ivins
Latins for Republicans - it's like roaches for Raid. 
— John Leguizamo
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.
— George Orwell, 1984
Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of always choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.
— Otto von Bismarck
When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the moon will be at a given time; we know precisely how fast a spacecraft will enter or exist the earth's orbit. If we get the equations right, the rocket will land where it is supposed to--always. Human beings are more complex than that. A recovering drug addict does not behave as predictably as a rocket in orbit. We don't have a formula for persuading a sixteen-year-old not to drop out of school. But we do have a powerful tool: We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that. Our best hope for improving the human condition is to understand why we act the way we do and then plan accordingly. Programs, organizations, and systems work better when they get the incentives right. It is like rowing downstream.
— Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science
The country is dying cause of an lack of men, not a lack of programms.
— Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries
All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resent domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger.
— Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
Being President is like being the groundskeeper in a cemetery: there are a lot of people under you, but none of them are listening.
— Bill Clinton
But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.
— T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.
— Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture, and the Bolsheviks, 1917-1918
Conservatism is not about tradition and morality, hasn't been for many decades... It is about the putative biological and spiritual superiority of the wealthy.
— Greg Bear
As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.
— Molly Ivins
Indeed, one concern would be that the initial neoconservative response to a zombie outbreak would be to invade Iraq again out of force of habit.
— Daniel W. Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies
Right now, the economy is a whole lot like a fairly good-looking brain-dead chick in a persistent vegetative coma. You can't really wake her up, but there's things she's still good for.
— Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny
These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.Wait—Texas? Wasn't Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn't its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that 'we have billions in surplus'? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting—the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending—has been implemented most completely. If the theory can't make it there, it can't make it anywhere.
— Paul Krugman
A disordered currency is one of the greatest political evils.
— Daniel Webster
[Bill] Clinton was a pretty good president for a Republican.
— Michael Moore
White men have screwed this country up! I would like a black, female…. everything all rolled into one.I want something different. I want a real change. People, I want a president who speaks well, who has a sense of humor. This guy is such a moron! It's beyond the point where it's a joke. He's an idiot.
— Denis Leary
...When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship.
— Naomi Wolf, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries
It’s a saying from thousands of years ago, written in a language called Latin about a place called Rome,” he explains. “Panem et Circenses translates into ‘Bread and Circuses.’ The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)
— William Gibson
It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.
— Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad
I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.
— Warren Buffett
A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.
— Henry A. Wallace
We must realize that the Reformation world view leads in the direction of government freedom. But the humanist world view with inevitable certainty leads in the direction of statism. This is so because humanists, having no god, must put something at the center, and it is inevitably society, government, or the state.
— Francis A. Schaeffer
I have learned that one should say "Peace!" to those who shout their hatred for one's being and presence or at one's passage.
— Tariq Ramadan, What I Believe
The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.
— Otto von Bismarck
...all members of Congress should be required wear NASCAR uniforms. You know, the kind with the patches? That way we'd know who is sponsoring each of them. I think he was kidding; they'd never be able to do it but it's a great idea and would wake people up in this country.
— Brad Thor, Full Black
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities
Republicans don't like people to talk about depressions. You can hardly blame them for that. You remember the old saying: Don't talk about rope in the house where somebody has been hanged.
— Harry Truman
The '60s redefined narcissism as idealism.
— Dennis Prager
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
— Michel Foucault
Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for.
— Molly Ivins
In modern politics, even the leader of the free world needs help from the sultan of Facebookistan.
— Rebecca MacKinnon
Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials. 
— Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world. 
— Reinhold Niebuhr
I think it’s important that (Roe v. Wade) remain legal for medical reasons and other reasons.
— Laura Bush
[American] liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say.
— Jonah Goldberg
When the president during the campaign said he was against nation building, I didn't realize he meant our nation.
— Al Franken
Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Don't let them tell us stories
— Albert Camus
Gay diversity is like the Village People. You can all wear different stupid outfits as long as you sing the same stupid song.
— Jack Malebranche
What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.
— Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography
Where are our Men of abilities? Why do they not come forth to save their Country?
— George Washington
By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims supressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
I find that the world is changing much, much faster than I can even bitch about it.
— Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
Political corruption, social greed, and Americanized quasi-socialism can ruin even the most wonderful places. California proved that.
— Tiffany Madison
Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?""Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.
— Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism."(Speech in Rome on 20 January, 1927, praising Mussolini)
— Winston S. Churchill
A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.
— Adlai E. Stevenson II
[Two respondents] minimized the assimilationist implications of the dominant account; Russ Silver rejects the idea entirely.I have no interest in being accepted. I consider this system corrupt, and I don't want to be accepted by it. We're in this together. Faggots, junkies, women, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, don't you see it? Don't you see that our white male government doesn't care about us? When I say this it shocks coat-and-tie lesbians and gay men everywhere. Well, I'm sorry, folks; if you had AIDS you would know what I know: The government doesn't give a goddamn cent for a faggot's life.
— Vera Whisman, Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity
When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.
— Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom....Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.
— Peggy Noonan, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now
Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. And the time has now arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and to help them get that protection.
— Harry Truman
I love to engage in repartee with people who are stupider than I am. 
— Ann Coulter
If you think Hollywood is depressing and corrupt, politics is really depressing and corrupt -- and fueled even more than Hollywood by money -- if that's possible.
— Ben Affleck
When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?
— Walter Kirn
Government should do a few things, and do them right
— George W. Bush
Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Nonviolent action on behalf of justice is no automatic forumla with promise of success: but neither is war. After all, at least half of the people who go to war for some cause deemed worthy of it are defeated.
— John Howard Yoder, When War is Unjust: Being Honest in Just-War Thinking
The Government is making a fool of itself by attributing all terrorism and acts against the government only to one single patriot
— Carlos Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla
Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.
— bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
He who causes another to become powerful ruins himself, for he brings such a power into being either by design or by force, and both of these elements are suspects to the one whom he has made powerful.
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Over the last fifteen months we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been to fifty-seven states. I think, one left to go.
— Barack Obama
It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.
— Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama's running so we all can fly.
— Jay-Z
The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round.
— Paul Krugman
The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned.The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.
— Henry A. Wallace
It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.
— John Pilger, Hidden Agendas
When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?
— George Orwell, 1984
Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once.
— David Hume
Republican or Democrat, this nation's affluent urban and suburban classes understand their bread is buttered on the corporate side. The primary difference between the two parties is that the Republicans pretty much admit that they grasp and even endorse some of the nastiest facts of life in America. Republicans honestly tell the world: "Listen in on my phone calls, piss-test me until I'm blind, kill and eat all of my neighbors right in front of my eyes, but show me the money! Let me escape with every cent I can kick out of the suckers, the taxpayers, and anybody else I can get a headlock on, legally or otherwise." Democrats, in contrast, seem content to catalog the GOP's outrages against the Republic, showing proper indignation while laughing at episodes of The Daily Show. But they stand behind the American brand: imperialism. They "support our troops," though you will be hard put to find any of them who have served alongside them or who would send one of their own kids off to lose an eye or an arm in Iraq. They play the imperial game, maintain their credit ratings, and plan to keep the beach house and the retirement investments if it means sacrificing every damned Lynndie England in West Virginia.
— Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.
— Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto
Tides are like politics. They come and go with a great deal of fuss and noise, but inevitably they leave the beach just as they found it. On those few occasions when major change does occur, it is rarely a good news.
— Jack McDevitt, Deepsix
To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental practices.
— Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Women deserve better than propaganda and lies to get into panties. Propaganda and lies to get into office, to get out of court, to get out of paying child support. Get the fuck out of our decisions and give us back our voice. Women deserve better; women deserve choice.
— Sonya Renee Taylor
This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one.
— Christopher Hitchens
What civilization has done to women’s bodies is no different than what it’s done to the earth, to children, to the sick, to the proletariat; in short, to everything that isn’t supposed to “talk,” and in general to whatever the knowledge-powers of government and management don’t want to hear, which is thus relegated to exclusion from all recognized activity, relegated to the role of a witness.
— Tiqqun
Indeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying","We understand how it is - we have one, too.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.
— Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
...We are all Federalists,and we are all Republicans.
— Thomas Jefferson
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
— Toni Morrison
I saw America's economy last night, people raiding dumpsters at a higher rate than normal in my home town. Digging through garbage shouldn't be a career. Thanks Democrats. Thanks Republicans.
— Carroll Bryant
If there is a smoke, there is a fire, the saying goes, That is quite true, but one should find what the fire is, and who lit it.
— Tariq Ramadan, What I Believe
In my view, the pro-life movement at this point should focus on seeking to reduce the number of abortions. At times it will require political education and legal fights, at times it will require education and the establishment of alternatives to abortion, such as adoption centers. Unfortunately, such measures are sometimes opposed by so-called hard-liners in the pro-life movement. These hard-liners are fools. Because they want to outlaw all abortions, they refuse to settle for stopping some abortions; the consequence is that they end up preventing no abortions.
— Dinesh D'Souza, Letters to a Young Conservative
That's just how white folks will do you. It wasn't merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn't know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn.
— Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Anarchists have a 'bad name' in the media, not because they can point to one indiscriminate massacre by anarchists--there have been none--but because the one thing holders of power fear is that they personally should be held responsible for their own actions
— Stuart Christie
If two parties with two sets of bad ideas cooperate, the result is not good policy, but policy that is extremely bad. What we really need are correct economic and politcal ideas, regardless of the party that pushes them.
— Ron Paul, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom
There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.
— Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
Bob Dole revealed he is one of the test subjects for Viagra. He said on Larry King, 'I wish I had bought stock in it.' Only a Republican would think the best part of Viagra is the fact that you could make money off of it.
— Jay Leno
The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces.
— Pope Benedict XVI, God Is Love: Encyclical Letter of Pope Benedict XVI
diplomacy, n.: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
— Ambrose Bierce
And for once, Donald Rumsfeld, in the news at the time over the Iraq war made sense to me: "As we know," he said, famously, "there are known knowns-things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns-things we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns- things we don't know we don't know.
— Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo
What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace - a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we're in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported.
— Peggy Noonan, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now
World events do not occur by accident. They are made to happen, whether it is to do with national issues or commerce; and most of them are staged and managed by those who hold the purse strings.
— Denis Healey
Our government, conceived in liberty and purchased with blood, can be preserved only by constant vigilance. May we guard it as our children's richest legacy, for what shall it profit our nation if it shall gain the whole world and lose “the spirit that prizes liberty as the heritage of all men in all lands everywhere”?
— William Jennings Bryan
[Richard Bedford Bennett] was the richest Prime Minister and the only millionaire to hold office before Pierre Trudeau. His money obviously colored his thinking -- colored it true blue -- but he did not consider it a political drawback. No leader, he said, could serve the public properly if he was constantly looking over his shoulder at the shadow of debts. This theory is now widely accepted in the United States where it has become practically impossible for a non-millionaire to run for high office without selling pieces of himself like a prize-fighter. Yet the public still suspects a self-made millionaire like Lyndon Johnson while revering the much-richer John F. Kennedy, who got it all from his father. 
— Gordon Donaldson, Eighteen Men: The Prime Ministers Of Canada
I have no doubt that the nation has suffered more from undue secrecy than from undue disclosure. The government takes good care of itself.
— Daniel Schorr
History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.
— Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado