Issues Quotes - Page 17

When you've spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment, it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands.

Well, the most important thing a president will be is commander-in-chief. And that requires having an understanding of the complex issues on foreign policy. Foreign policy presents us often with hard choices, not black or white choices.

The core issue here is that the Israeli government refuses to commit to terms of reference for the negotiations that are based on international law and United Nations resolutions, and that it frantically continues to intensify building of settlements on the territory of the State of Palestine.

They [Federal Goverment] don't care if I am guilty or innocent. I serve their purpose in here. Other than what I have mentioned, what fear could they possibly have from a old man with dimming eyesight, arthritis, diabetes, and other health issues that render me hardly a threat to anyone.

It is amazing to me that we allow so many people with so little proven character to set our national policy on issues that will ultimately be paid for by the rest of us.

I do ballads that say what every man wants to say and that every woman wants to hear, or I do songs about social issues.

No Congress ever has seen fit to amend the Constitution to address any issue related to marriage. No Constitutional Amendment was needed to ban polygamy or bigamy, nor was a Constitutional Amendment needed to set a uniform age of majority to ban child marriages.

What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.

[Lighting a cigarette] Well, I'm not here to impinge on anybody else's lifestyle. If I'm in a place where I know I'm going to harm somebody's health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I'm concerned.

We will not allow to become a political issue in this country the question of Asianisation.

Democracy is one person, one vote and a full discussion of the issues that affect us. Oligarchy is billionaires buying elections, voter suppression and a concentrated corporate media determining what we see, hear and read.

I think we have to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past. I think we have to seek to create coalitional strategies that go beyond racial lines. We need to bring black communities, Chicano communities, Puerto Rican communities, Asian American communities together.

Of course, we also are soberly aware that historical problems remain in cross-strait relations, and that there will be issues in the future that will require time, patience and joint efforts to resolve.

The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).

People of good character are not all going to come down on the same side of difficult political and social issues. Good people - people of character and moral literacy - can be conservative, and good people can be liberal. We must not permit our disputes over thorny political questions to obscure the obligation we have to offer instruction to all our young people in the area in which we have, as a society, reached a consensus: namely, on the importance of good character, and some of its pervasive particulars.

The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue really sets the social standard for what people expect the perfect woman's body to look like, and a lot of those bodies usually look the same.

This is an issue that women are not interested in debating.

The world does not need a better definition of issues, or better planning or project management. It needs the issues and the plans to have more of an impact, which is the promise of engagement.

We call an intention good which is right in itself, but the action is good, not because it contains within it some good, but because it issues from a good intention.

I want to seduce the audience. If they can go along for a ride they wouldn't ordinarily take, or don't even know they're taking, then they might see highly charged political issues in a new and unexpected way. . . . The theatre is now so afraid to face its social demons that we've given that responsibility over to film. But it will always be harder to deal with certain issues in the theatre. The live event - being watched by people as we watch - makes it seem all the more dangerous.

One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you're going to put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That's politics at its most basic.

Today I will refuse to jump into the middle of others' affairs, issues, and relationships. I will trust others to work out their own problems, including the ideas and feelings they want to communicate to each other.

The sense of being alone is a huge issue for so many people in this world. As a worshipper of Jesus, there's a very real sense that we are always seen, held and known.

I sometimes wish taste wasn't ever an issue, and the sounds of instruments or synths could be judged solely on their colour and timbre. Judged by what it did to your ears, rather than what its historical use reminds you of.

Poverty is a very complicated issue, but feeding a child isn't.