Political quotes
7.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary."
"Rehearse death. To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. He is above, or at any rate, beyond the reach of, all political powers."
"I think you've got to worry when you start flying flags. There's a lot of political connotations that come with waving flags around the stage. But the flag will make an appearance. I think it's more likely to be draped around an instrument than waved around."
"It has always seemed slightly uncomfortable, the idea of politicised musicians. Very few of them are clever enough to do it; if they're good at the political side, the music side suffers, and vice versa."
"Professional politicians like to talk about the value of experience in government. Nuts! The only experience you gain in politics is how to be political."
"The United Sates has much to offer the third world war."
"Before Katrina, it was a longstanding tradition in our country for political officials to wait until the last minute to warn, to take action, to evacuate. No more. With Irene, you had mass evacuations - mandatory ones - issued days ahead of time. That was the right thing to do."
"Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument."
"The Arab is trying to be pleased with death and murder and mayhem and disease and poverty and political unrest."
"Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches."
"See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout."
"Mass civil disobedience is like an earthquake, a sort of general upheaval on the political plane."
"Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks."
"power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money."
"The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one's equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed."
"Only in romance novels or in thrillers people live outside of a social and political context."
"Although Verwoerd thought Africans were lower than animals, his death did not yield us any pleasure. Political assassination is not something I or the ANC ever supported. It is a primitive way of contending with an opponent"
"I can't define myself as a political writer - I don't think I've earned it, and I don't function as a political writer in the way that many of the writers I admire do. It's not simply a question of context, of where I'm writing from - there is much in American society that urgently needs to be written about. I think your work is always engaged with politics in the looser sense of the word - and that looseness is itself a kind of privilege - because politics and culture are evidently intertwined."
"I think that all my books are political, I think that I have a political body of work. I am essentially a political woman, but above all I am a poet. I am a poetess."
"Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason."
