#election

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly. ↗

— Tariq Ali

#elections

For it is dangerous to attach one's self to the crowd in front, and so long as each one of us is more willing to trust another than to judge for himself, we never show any judgement in the matter of living, but always a blind trust, and a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction. It is the example of other people that is our undoing; let us merely separate ourselves from the crowd, and we shall be made whole. But as it is, the populace,, defending its own iniquity, pits itself against reason. And so we see the same thing happening that happens at the elections, where, when the fickle breeze of popular favour has shifted, the very same persons who chose the praetors wonder that those praetors were chosen. ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#groupthink #milgram #mob #pith #elections

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#civil-rights-movement #ethnology #identity-politics #martin-luther-king-jr #perjury

The difficulty of looking at a system like natural selection if you have any sort of moral sense yourself, is almost what makes it beautiful. ↗

— Paul Bettany

#any #beautiful #difficulty #like #looking

It is certainly not unrealistic to think we could have elections by mid-year 2004 and when a sovereign government is installed - my job here will be done. ↗

— Paul Bremer

#could #done #elections #government #here

Religion, for better or for worse, has been politicized in blatant ways that have seldom been equaled in American elections. ↗

— Tony Campolo

#been #better #blatant #elections #equaled

The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#hg #want

When one with honeyed words but evil mind Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state. ↗

— Euripides

#deceit #deception #elections #evil #false-promises

The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman think about the next generation ↗

— Hillary Rodham Clinton

#politics #statesmen #elections

انتخابات مزورة، كل شخص في البلد يعلم انها مزورة، ومع ذلك يعترف بها رسمياً وتحكم بها البلاد، ويعني هذا أن يستقر في ضمير الشعب أن نوابه لصوص سرقوا كراسيهم، وأن وزراءه لصوص سرقوا بالتالي مناصبهم، وأن سلطاته وحكومته مزيفة مزورة، وأن السرقة والتزييف والتضليل مشروعة رسمياً.. ألا يعذر الرجل العادي إذا كفر بالمبادئ والخلق وآمن بالزيف والانتهازية؟ ↗

— نجيب محفوظ

#fraud #government #parliament #politics #elections