Political Quotes - Page 221

I really wanted to make a nonpolitical political film. I wanted something that folks in red states and blue states could look at and not ask if this is the right thing to do to be in this war, but what this war is doing to the fabric of our society.

In the modern world, we Americans are the old inhabitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial production, an economy of abundance.

I plan to stand up and be counted. And the thing I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna do what we're gonna do right now. I'm going to the people and say, 'Now this is what I'm trying to do.' And I'm going to do this because I believe the people need representation.

Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.

I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it. I have to rethink how I live my life. I'm not a political essayist; I don't see that I would have any value cranking out articles for newspapers or magazines, because lots of people are doing that already.

Everybody's got to reclaim these thingspoetry, rock'n'roll, political activismand it's got to be done over and over again. It's like eating: you can't say,'Oh, I ate yesterday'.You have to eat again.

I think we can work through a lot of political and international problems, but what really frightens me is what's happening environmentally.

A lot of the music that I grew up loving has a really political bent to it.

I never want to be that guy spouting off my political views. I mean, they're pretty well known, and it certainly comes out. If something's bugging my ass on any particular day, I'm probably going to say something about it, but I'm not going to go on a tirade. I dislike George Bush as much as probably anybody on earth could, but having said that...I've said it, you know? It's not like I'm going to change anybody's mind.

When you have the Chief of Staff of the Republican National Committee and the political director of the Romney campaign, and their two companies get $150 million at the end of the campaign for the 'fantastic' get-out-the-vote program... some of this borders on RICO violations.

With good planning, Africa can have cities, farms, factories, export processing zones. But if the political will is there, the huge areas - the Serengeti, the Okavango, the Kalahari, Kruger - these wonderful, huge places for wildlife could still be set aside and protected, and be treasures for humanity for many generations to come.

We have to stop this violence. We have to make the political nature of the violence clear, that the violence we experience in our own homes is not a personal family matter, it's a public and political problem. It's a way that women are kept in line, kept in our places.

I've personally backed off from direct political involvement.

What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.

There was great political uncertainty in South Asia at the time of the Buddha. The older small tribal societies were cracking up and gave way to bigger states. There was much more trade and travel going on than before. To people in the cities the experience of living in a small place where you knew everyone and governed your affairs by consensual democracy had been lost.

So much of democracy is built on antagonism. It institutionalizes a certain kind of antagonism. This is not to say that we shouldn't have any democracy, but the fact is that democracy has hardened political identities and made them more violent.

I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan Collini's phrase, "public moralists" and politicians, plutocrats, bankers, arms dealers, and experts and technocrats were not solely defining the moral norms as well as the political lives of our societies. We do have some writers claiming to be public moralists, but, as I said, they have actually been more jingoistic than even the henchmen of Bush and Blair.

I'd love to say that I could write political songs, but I don't feel clued-up enough.

I think as a consequence of that, there is also a fair amount of uncertainty about engaging in political activity that would be immediately suspect and seen as evidence as a sort of resurgent militancy.

There's no social realism in 'Tyrannosaur.' It's not about the social landscape or the political landscape or any of that. It's just about human beings. I never made 'Tyrannosaur' in reference to anybody - I just made it because I had to make my own films.

There aren't many political humorists. Dave Barry is excellent, but he doesn't do it much.

[Al] Franken is left-wing and funny. He's a pretty good political humorist.

Intelligence collection has been given an additional bureaucracy to correct the problems created by too much bureaucracy in intelligence collection.

Political stuff is all about his [Hunter S. Thompson] reaction to a situation. And my stuff is much more externally driven.

I try to ONLY ridicule people who's efforts are sincere. Very little trouble has been caused in the world by insincere efforts. An occasional seduction maybe. There were very few insincere Stalinists or Nazis.