Political Quotes - Page 255

I think it's very sad that the political landscape is so dotted with religious extremists who feel the need to infringe upon the lives of decent, free and harmless Americans who want nothing more than to be in love and to spend the rest of their lives together.

I have healthy disagreements with political parties I'm not aligned with, but I don't think it should be to the point where we're cursing and trying to strangle each other.

I think it's very difficult in the first go-round for congressional people and political people to understand the linkages that exist between us and the rest of the world. That we're not insular anymore.

When any welfare scheme is being proposed, its political sponsors always dwell on what a generous and compassionate government should pay to Paul; they neglect to mention that this additional money must be seized from Peter.

State violence cannot be defined simply as a political issue but also as a pedagogical issue that wages violence against the minds, desires, bodies and identities of young people as part of the reconfiguration of the social state into the punishing state.

How young people are represented betrays a great deal about what is increasingly new about the economic, social, cultural and political constitution of American society and its growing disinvestment in young people, the social state and democracy itself.

Margaret Thatcher in Britain and soon after Ronald Reagan in the United States - both hard-line advocates of market fundamentalism - announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem not the solution. Democracy and the political process were all but sacrificed to the power of corporations and the emerging financial service industries, just as hope was appropriated as an advertisement for a whitewashed world in which the capacity of culture to critique oppressive social practices was greatly diminished.

Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment.

War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society.

We need a new political language with broader narratives. Such a language has to unravel the pervasive ideological, pedagogical, and economic dynamics of a form of economic Darwinism that now governs much of the world. This system must be demystified, politicized, and recognized for the ways in which it has come to pose a dire threat to democracy.

The loan crisis and the increasing slashing of funds for students, coupled with the astronomical rise in tuition, represent an unparalleled attack on the social state. The hidden agenda here is that when students graduate with such high debts, they rarely choose a career in public service; instead, they are forced to go into the corporate sector, and I see these conditions, in some ways, as being very calculated and as part of a larger political strategy to disempower students.

That generation really has to fight for a new political language, social movements, and alliances with students from other countries. They have to convince labor, parents, and the general public that the fight over higher education is a fight that benefits everyone in a sustainable democracy and not just faculty and students.

Many university presidents assume the language and behavior of CEOs and in doing so they are completely reneging on the public mission of the universities. The state is radically defunding public universities and university presidents, for the most part, rather than defending higher education as a public good, are trying to privatize their institutions in order to remove them from the political control of state governments. This is not a worthy or productive strategy.

Symptoms of ethical, political and economic impoverishment are all around us.

They're rights that should be endemic to any democracy. The right to a free quality education, from elementary school right through higher education. The right to have a decent social wage. The right to a decent job. Political rights; the right to vote. These are all parts of the social contract, from the New Deal onwards, that never went far enough.

Increasingly fed by a moral and political hysteria, warlike values produce and endorse shared fears as the primary register of social relations.

In authoritarian societies, control over the production, distribution, and circulation is generally in the hands of the government, or what might be termed traditional modes of political sovereignty. But in neoliberal societies, sovereignty is often in the hands of major corporations that now have power over not only the production of knowledge but also over the implementation of policies that bear down on matters of life and death, living and surviving.

Confronting the intolerable should be challenging and upsetting. Who could read the testimonies of Primo Levi and not feel intellectually and emotionally exhausted? Or Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, not to mention those of Malcolm X? It is the conditions that produce violence that should upset us ethically and prompt us to act responsibly, rather than to capitulate to a privatized emotional response that substitutes a therapeutic language for a political and worldly one.

State violence operating under the guise of personal safety and security, while parading as a bulwark of democracy, actually does the opposite and cancels out democracy as the incommensurable sharing of existence that makes the political possible.

Political parties are like poets, born, not made.

No man is fit to be a Senator...unless he is willing to surrender his political life for great principle.

When I have to choose between voting for the people or the special interests, I always stick with the special interests. They remember. The people forget.

Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.

What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?

I am half-surprised to find that as I go on I get more and more confirmed in the old advanced Liberal principles, economic, social, and political, with which I entered Parliament 30 years ago.