right” answer to every moral question. In practice, however, he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power.

He believed that lack of education was the root of all of Pakistan’s problems. Ignorance allowed politicians to fool people and bad administrators to be re-elected.

If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government...

As heirs to a legacy more than two centuries old, it is understandable why present-day Americans would take their own democracy for granted. A president freely chosen from a wide-open field of two men every...

From the ethical point of view, no one can escape responsibility with the excuse that he is only an individual, on whom the fate of the world does not depend. Not only can this not...

Nonviolent action on behalf of justice is no automatic forumla with promise of success: but neither is war. After all, at least half of the people who go to war for some cause deemed worthy...

Steal from those beneath you; attack those above you.

The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking

What these men represented was not ‘The West’ but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one...

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

Gandhi Topi’ is no longer an attire of the pacifist.

Religion should be subject to commonsense appraisal and rational review, as openly discussible as, say, politics, art and the weather. The First Amendment, we should recall, forbids Congress both from establishing laws designating a state...

This match is about sport and I separate that completely from politics.

terrorism n.Violence for political purposes or the politically motivated threat of violence which, either intentionally or unintentionally, challenges the state’s monopoly on political violence.

There are seven things that will destroy us:Wealth without work;Pleasure without conscience;Knowledge without character;Religion without sacrifice;Politics without principle;Science without humanity;Business without ethics.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted...

Jerry Falwell said that the reason that September 11th happened, the reason that God allowed it to happen, was because of certain people in our country. People like, and I’m quoting, ‘the pagans,’ which is...

I don’t think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.

The political vision of the religious right is for the most part an individualistic politics of righteousness, not a communal politics of compassion.

Here is a man whose life and actions the world has already condemned – yet whose enormous fortune…has already brought him acquittal!

Morality, Sir, is the monologue of the unexcited and the unexcitable, the revenge of the unsuccessful, the punishment of those who tried and failed, or who never had the courage to try at all.

Government succeeds by failing.

liberalists” in Tamil community since the 70s to the late 90s, has been replaced by the age of farce.

It is not ‘progressive’ to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.

I agree with you that in politics the middle way is no way at all.

Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but...

Enraging liberals is simply one of the more enjoyable side effects of my wisdom.

The work of an intellectual is not to form the political will of others; it is, through the analyses he does in his own domains, to bring assumptions and things taken for granted again into...

Obama’s plan for “change”: Let’s do everything Bush did, only with more suck! Because it just didn’t suck badly enough the first time!

Having two non-functional parties is not a democracy, it’s a losing coin flip.

Jesus’ incarnation and ministry thus present us with the final critique of strategic religion; on the cross, where we see God almost deliberately ‘lose’ – as if duped into being strung up by a scheming,...

Many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in...

Although distortion of the past is widespread, the most common travesty is one of omission, wherein populist leaders neglect to mention the crimes committed by their own side or recollect them in such a way...

The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious...

To change a political system, the majority of the thinking citizens must unite, speak with one voice and stand firm like one leg.

By making the government a combination of elected officials and citizen-backed initiatives and referenda, there can truly be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

With the single exception of the American Revolution, the aftermath of all revolutions from 1789 on only worsened the human condition.

It is time to write it in the books of law.” By the time Lyndon Johnson left office he had done a lot of writing in those books, had become, above all presidents save Lincoln,...

There are things people don’t understand. And they do what they want. There are rules that are not meant to be broken.

Conservatives believe in equality of opportunity. Liberals believe in equality of outcome.

What has to do with your ability to fall asleep is not caffeine. It’s having a clean conscience. I have a clean conscience so I can drink all the caffeine I want.

I once heard a Chicago-area pastor put it this way: we don’t need more Americans bowing down to the Democrat donkey or the Republican elephant. We need more Americans bowing down to the Lion of...

…The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had...

All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness...

All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people. He’s about double the numbers now. Can you imagine if McCain had won and did precisely what Obama has done, with...

The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned

There’s a sense amongst liberals — who read identity politics into most everything — that conservative women are somehow traitors to their gender (much the same way that black conservatives are traitors to their race...

For an entire wing of the G.O.P., a dysfunctional government, whose only visible activity is mismanaging crises, is not an embarrassment but the vindication of a worldview.

If the U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, they cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. On 9/11/2001, Americans noticed that payback can be a real motherfucker.