Pussy Riot have certainly changed some people's assumptions about the role of political art and the relationship between the intelligentsia and the church. That's a hell of a lot to do in a forty-second performance.
I received the Media for Liberty Award from Swedish PEN, and the prize was awarded by the Swedish minister of culture, who also happens to be the minister of sport. When she handed me the award, I said, Thank you, it's wonderful to be recognized, but we journalists always want more. So madam minister, I have a personal favor to ask you: Do not go to Sochi. And she announced that she was going to Sochi, but she's not attending the ceremonies, for political reasons. It's a very pointed stance.
The reason Vladimir Putin released Pussy Riot, the Greenpeace activists who were kidnapped in international waters and kept in prison for two months, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's best-known and longest-serving political prisoner, was because he finally started panicking and realized that he may not have anyone to take pictures with.
You can't expect people who didn't exist as a community at all until about twenty years ago to have formed a political movement. This attack on the LGBT community was very shocking to the people who consider themselves to be activists. They're basically playing in the sandbox, and there's a tank coming! And what are they supposed to do - use the plastic shovel to push the tank back? But since the homosexual propaganda legislation, people have really stepped up, educated themselves politically, and grown by leaps and bounds.
There are several dozen political prisoners in Russia. When I cite that number people are often very surprised. They often think there are more. Well - there are hundreds of thousands of people who haven't had a fair trial, who are victims of the political system. But in the Amnesty International sense of the word, most of them are not political prisoners because they are not going to prison for protesting.
Political poetry is the hardest thing to write because you cannot preach to the converted, and if you're only seeking to convert, then write an editorial. I hope I can write about Trump; he's too major a force not to be written about.
Partly, I'm worried that no one is saying anything because they are afraid of being seen as politically correct.
I've been through so many different political races.
I would also hope that no one would think about trying to amend the constitution as a political strategy.
As far as politically how country music goes, it's true that it's regarded from a distance as a genre of music that at different times, the more right elements of the political spectrum have claimed for their own.
It's interesting that these themes of crime and political corruption are always relevant.
In political life, it is extremely difficult to remain loyal to a friendship when constellations of power or interests are in the way.
I still hope that the American system of checks and balances will ultimately prevent this man, Donald Trump, with his erratic political style, from jeopardizing our European security architecture.
The World Cup is not just a great global sporting event, it is also inscribed with much deeper cultural and political importance.
After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity.
To capture the human cost of fallen empire with all its horror and absurdity, Sheets offers the right combination: the political insight of a top reporter and the power of a novelist.
Though the views of members of the House and Senate are as divergent as the people we represent, we bear the responsibility to work through our political differences and get things done. That's our job.
I have to be honest and say members of both political parties have contributed to de-legitimization of the process. Even President Barack Obama when he was a senator, contributed to it, in the sense of voting against a well-qualified individual because he disagreed with the view. Again, that's the prerogative of the senators. They're allowed to express their views on any basis.
Political parties exist to get bums on seats.
The Left/Right scale is a misleading way of comparing political systems. It doesn't measure anything.
There are some audiences who are uncomfortable with the ambiguity, though. They want a film to chew their food for them, they want Hollywood endings that tie everything together in the end and answer all of the questions. They are usually people on one extreme of the political spectrum or other and they haven't been happy because the film is not polemical enough on their side. They aren't usually people who aren't interested in understanding points of view that they disagree with - they just want to attack their opponents - and I'm ok with them not liking the film.
The fact is that there's hundreds of thousands of incredibly motivated, active political partisans working on the blogs. These people generate buzz, it generates local activism. These aren't the kind of people that pay attention a little to politics, turn it off and then do something else. They live and breathe politics. And anybody that wants to build a movement or a successful campaign needs people like the people who read blogs.
You could power America with renewables from a technical and economic standpoint. The biggest obstacles are social and political - what you need is the will to do it.
But no, I'm not political. My obligation is to pull the lever and elect somebody who's going to make life a little better for everybody, especially those who don't have as much good fortune as others.
If you can come up with a snappy little slogan, then you have a future in winning tagline competitions or being a political speech writer.
