Deception and privileged secrets are common facets of politics.

School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards — wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity — come from ignoring others and improving ourselves.

Corporate greed controls political will.

I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.

In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.

The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as ‘Fat Man and Little Boy.’) And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It...

Here we introduce the nation’s first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history’s first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union’s man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as “a third rate nonentity.” But the firm and its...

International awareness of his deceptive practices is the reflection of the frustration that is prevailing in Sri Lanka which the President is trying to undermine by the traditional emotive and hate mongering politics.

Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.

When a man is on the road to power he buys everyone a drink. Once elected he tries to close the saloons.

War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is...

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

But since my intention is to write something useful for anyone who understands it, it seemed more suitable for me to search after the effectual truth of the matter rather than its imagined one. Many writers have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen nor known to exist in reality. For there is...

In a truly moral society, most of our current laws would not exist.

Latinos are here to stay. As citizen Raquel, I’m proud to be Latina.

Woe to any sheep that hunts with wolves – rjs

There are three laws that govern our universe – laws of physics, laws of nature, and spiritual laws. Like the laws of physics and nature, spiritual laws are just as precise as any mathematics equation.

And I reminded myself that a woman should be able to dress as she liked without a man hurting her…

I know I have a strong India connect. Is it Subhash Chandra Bose or my father who left my Austrian mother when I was one? – Catherine Khan

You would not tolerate for one moment the conduct in an individual that is commonplace in the acts of some nations. You would lock up such a person.

Ainsi donc, en s’alliant à un pouvoir politique, la religion augmente sa puissance sur quelques-uns, et perd l’espérance de régner sur tous.

All U.S. administrations, be it Republican or Democratic, must pursue the same bipartisan politics. I don’t see much difference between the policy of the Republican administration or Democratic administration

PUSH, n. One of the two things mainly conducive to success, especially in politics. The other is Pull.

The pistachio: it’s just like our politics. When the two sides are divided, that’s when the nuts come out.

[“The Devil in the Dark”] impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today’s politicians have yet to learn.

No more good must be attempted than the nation can bear

Infuriatingly stupid analysts – especially people who called themselves Arabists, yet who seemed to know next to nothing about the reality of the Islamic world – wrote reams of commentary [after 9/11]. Their articles were all about Islam saving Aristotle and the zero, which medieval Muslim scholars had done more than eight hundred years ago;...

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of Decency.

Saladin had the same immediate successor as all the great Muslim leaders of his time: civil war. Barely had he died that his empire was dismembered.

He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something. Action led to action, free...

When an entire segment of the world is burned and reduced to a lawless battleground for thugs and mercenaries, a land where government does not exist, where the slate of history is being wiped out and hope has drowned in gallons of innocent blood, the only respite comes in the form of the open seas...

The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till out political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich, – a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.

Being exposed to those beauty queens and Praying Mantises at the same time made me ask myself some hard questions. Would I have been so radical had I not been so fat? Could I have been one of the women on the other side parading my beauty of which I was so proud? As I...

But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.

Every day in America is a day with a shooting.

I had discovered long ago the first lesson of political courage: to think anew. I had then learned the second: to be prepared to lead and to decide. I was now studying the third: how to take the calculated risk. I was going to alienate some people, like it or not. The moment you decide,...

There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America.

[C]oncepts of dying in to a heaven or hell seem a good deal more political than spiritual. (124)

What is a woman’s place in this modern world? Jasnah Kholin’s words read. I rebel against this question, though so many of my peers ask it. The inherent bias in the inquiry seems invisible to so many of them. They consider themselves progressive because they are willing to challenge many of the assumptions of the...

Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States – and will so long as these exist – the most violent struggles of...

Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square.

But, Jefferson worried that the people – and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle – are easily misled. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to involve themselves in the political process. Without that, he...

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves ; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of...

COULD WE HAVE LIVED OUR lives ignoring politics? The Occupation determined the crops that the fallah planted, it stood in the face of every industrial project, it prevented us from establishing our own financial institutions, it hampered our wishes for education, it censored what could be published, it deprived us of a voice in the...

Eso es política, y la política es estúpida. Ante un problema, una conducta racional sería tratar de solucionarlo, pero la solución política siempre será negar su existencia.

I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in “A,” “B,” “C” and “D.” Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their...

Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public

Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn’t) ‘if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”, Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I ‘gave’ a farewell party for Martin Walker of the Guardian, and then...

But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.