#election

Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#vote #elections

The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone. So if there is a message I have to give, it is that if I've found one overriding thing about my personal election, it's the fact that if a gay person can be elected, it's a green light. And you and you and you, you have to give people hope.... ↗

— Harvey Milk

#lgbt #elections

The European reaction to Obama is a European delusion. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#elections

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election. ↗

— Otto von Bismarck

#hunting #lying #people #war #elections

The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, Sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable; and let it come! I repeat, Sir, let it come! ↗

— Patrick Henry

#elections

To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight - it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil - but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you chose, you elected, is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about. ↗

— Matt Taibbi

#elections #politics #religion

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

— Tariq Ali

#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

You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government. ↗

— Guy de Maupassant

#elections #fools #government #intelligence #masses

I am constitutionally competent to contest the elections. ↗

— Benazir Bhutto

#competent #constitutionally #contest #elections #i