Political Quotes
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Political Quotes |
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"Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends... ...when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object." -- Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943.
"It takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the coalition is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement. The war itself is the American war crime." -- James Carroll, The Boston Globe, 7 December 2004
"The decision to rely heavily on high-altitude air
power, target urban infrastructure and repeatedly attack heavily populated
towns and villages has reflected a deliberate trade-off of
the lives of American pilots and soldiers, not with those of their declared
Taliban enemies, but with Afghan civilians... There will be
no official two-minute silence for the Afghan dead, no newspaper
obituaries or memorial services attended by the prime minister, as there
were for the victims of the twin towers."
"Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and
violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith
that they are right and the other is evil."
"The peculiar evil of
silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human
race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent
from the opinion, still more than those who hold it."
"1,000 friends are not enough, but one enemy is too many."
"All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think --- and they could be right --- that continued torture
and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable
to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view."
About funding: "Every gun that is
made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those
who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending
money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of
its scientists, the houses of its children."
About what we promise the military: "With software products, it is
usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work
reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few
incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by
exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software
professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world
cannot avoid such problems."
"We've wasted a decade and billions of dollars in a quest for a
missile defense shield based on a technology that will never work."
How did SDI ever stage a comeback? It won't work, and it destroys our real defenses: international trust and global prosperity. It does make money for some, but it takes money from useful research and government projects.
About precedent: "Nixon used it, and we said, 'Oh, Jesus, what have we
done?"'
About fighting: "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file
has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by
mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice... Heroism
at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance,
how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I
would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It
is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an
act of murder."
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About war: "We managed
to get home. There were many problems along the way. They even used
water hoses to prevent us from going home. They demanded that we lay
down our arms. We refused to obey. It was not enough that we were
killed by bombs, now they are beating our parents. I shall not go
back there. This is not a war, this is frenzy in which it is both
difficult to survive and to remain sane. I want to keep my senses. I
don't want to kill anyone, nor do I want to be killed..."
Alison Bechdel's take on being a pacifist during a `just' war.
"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Oh, I mean, it's
not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something
like that?"
Farmer: "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking,
government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New
York Times-reading ..." Farmer's wife: "... Hollywood-loving,
left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs." -- Some
infighting Democrat 2004 primary attack ad, that I find too funny to
forget, even though I supported Dean (I don't drive Volvos or any
other car, but that's probably even freakier.)
"Our long national nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is finally
over."
``At the time we
were railing against the French, their soldiers were in Afghanistan [fighting
with coalition forces], which is where Al Qaeda is, after all.'' "Liberals have a set of folk theories that are fallacious. One of
them comes from the Enlightenment, and the assumption is that you are
supposed to be logical. They assume all you have to do is tell people
the facts and they will reason to the right conclusion. This is
utterly ridiculous. Thought is mainly metaphorical. The frames trump
all the facts." "If you're explaining, you're losing" About using your passport: "More and more obviously the surface of
the earth is being parceled off into three great empires, each
self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each
ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy."
"Naturally if you were born in the nineteenth century when evolution
first began to be known, and everything was being understood, really
understood everybody knew that if everything was really being and
going to be understood, and if there was going to be progress there
would not be any wars, and if there were not any wars then everything
could be and would be understood, and even if death and life were not
understood and eternity and beginning was not understood well that is
to say if they were not understood more than science understood them
better after all except in the unhappiness of adolescence better not
think about that." About empowerment: "I'm a mother of three. I'm concerned about the
future of America. So I'm running for Vice President" Massachusetts' motto: "By the sword she seeks peace, but peace
only under liberty."
About the Euro: "There were barking mad men in masks announcing: `The end of the
pound is nigh.' In my
day, it used to be the
Earth whose number was
up so this must be some
kind of progress."
About selling anti-globalization: "If there's one message you can
take away from State of Emergency, I think it's that capitalism
has finally, irrevocably won. Using advanced technology developed in
Japan and financed by a publishing company in the U.S., a group of
smart people in Scotland has created what's possibly the most useless
consumer product of all time... Playing State of Emergency is like
spiking the ball in the end zone of competing ideologies." About life: "We oppose the imposition of the death
penalty on all criminal offenders in all circumstances because of its
inherent cruelty, and, because an execution is an irrevocable
violation of the right to life, miscarriages of justice, when they
occur, can never be corrected." I'm opposed to the use of deadly force, in favor of universal health
care (the US has the highest infant mortality rate of any
industrialized nation!), in favor of reasonable waiting periods,
quantity limits and background checks for gun ownership, and against
the death penalty. Doesn't that make me `pro-life'? The Bible on
Abortion
About the definiton of politics: "This is not a political battle at
all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true."
About marriage: "I know the pain of being less than equal and I cannot and will not impose
that status on anyone else... I was but one generation removed from an existence
in slavery. I could not in good conscience ever vote to send anyone to that
place from which my family fled."
About democracy: "Our American system was, metaphorically
speaking, an early Napster-like political device to empower each
individual citizen to draw upon the memory and experience of all other
citizens and share in a collective control of the destiny of our
nation." Al Gore
(again), in the same Yahoo
Interview. (Incidently, he never said he invented
the internet.)
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."
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