Political Quotes - Page 139

We also have a lot of the same influences - we both read a lot of the beatniks. And yet what we actually do is almost exactly the opposite. His [ Hunter S. Thompson] political stuff is just wonderful, but basically nothing happens.

When politics are used to allocate resources, the resources all end up being allocated to politics.

Politics is not an exact science.

A statesman... must wait until he hears the steps of God sounding through events, then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment.

Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.

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.

Instead of ideological objectives of a political nature, today we are faced with ideological objectives of economic nature.

In spite of our poverty and our economic dependence, we do not have to give in, neither because we are sometimes abandoned nor because of the wish of some nations to impose their economic or political models.

Michael Jackson is timeless to me. The fact that he wanted to break the rules, that he was always talking about a new world, a global world - "Black or White," "They Don't Care About Us," "Heal the world. Make it a better place" - with this charisma, that always touched me. I'm obsessed with the fact that he went so political. He became a legend, and today I think he's still the King of Pop.

Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.

The creation of India and Pakistan were pyrrhic victories for their denizens because the political, socioeconomic, psychological, and culture havoc wreaked by that momentous event is reflected in those pogroms, ethnic cleansing, proliferation of nuclear weapons, poverty, and riots that continue to cause seismic tremors in the Indian subcontinent.

It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death of socialism.

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.

We don't have polls from the business world, but it's pretty clear that the energy corporations in America would be quite happy to be given authorization to go back into Iran instead of leaving all that to their rivals. But the state won't allow it. And it is setting up confrontations right now, very explicitly. Part of the reason is strategic, geo-political, economic, but part of the reason is the mafia complex. They have to be punished for disobeying us.

Take the US. Women were not even able to vote until 90 ago, at about the same time they gained the right in Afghanistan. Rights of former slaves were very limited until the 1960s, and in some ways still are. In these and other domains there has been progress in democracy, though still seriously flawed. In other dimensions - the control of concentrated wealth over the political process, for example, things have gotten much worse in recent years. And there is much more, in both directions.

Revolutions are not made for export.

Most of what needs to be changed in the euro zone can be done without treaty changes. The demand for treaty change is as political as it is legal and I don't think it's going to happen soon.

The world is a big place, and there are many paths that lead to success. This applies to both political and economic concepts. For this reason, we see no need to stoically pursue the Chinese, American or French way. But we have socialism in common with China.

If the Soviet empire still existed, I'd be terrified. The fact is, we can afford a fairly ignorant presidency now.

I love the environment, but I'm cheap on the environment.

The long experiment with professional politicians and professional government is over, and it failed.

Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.

Africans require, want, the franchise on the basis of one man one vote. They want political independence.

Climate change has taken on political dimensions. That's odd because I don't see people choosing sides over E=Mc2 or other fundamental facts of science.