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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #politic
A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols! ↗
He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something. Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one's cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificiently isolated from loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself? ↗
وفيما يخص الالتباس المتعلق بالموقف من الحداثة, فإن الأصل فيه يأتي من أن أحدا لم يلتفت- بما يكفي- إلي استقصاء السياق الفكري والمعرفي الذي تبلور فيه خطاب جماعة الإخوان المسلمين, وتيار الإسلام السياسي علي العموم, وذلك علي الرغم من غزارة الالتفات إلي السياق السياسي والتاريخي الذي أدي إلي ظهور كل منهما; والذي يتمثل في إعلان سقوط الخلافة في العام1924, بالذات. ولعل المدخل إلي الوعي بهذا السياق المهمل, ينطلق من الإقرار بأن تيار الإسلام السياسي- وضمنه جماعة الإخوان- هو جزء من صميم ما يعرف بظاهرة الحداثة العربية; وإلي حد إمكان القطع بأنه لو أمكن تصور غياب ظاهرة الحداثة علي العموم- والنمط العربي منها علي الخصوص- لما كان لتيار الإسلام السياسي أن يتبلور من الأساس. ويعني ذلك أنه يستحيل استيعاب ظاهرة الإسلام السياسي خارج القوانين والمحددات التي حكمت انبثاق وتطور ظاهرة التحديث في العالم العربي منذ العقود الأولي في القرن التاسع عشر. وبالطبع فإنه لا يؤثر في ذلك ما يجري الإيهام به من أن الإسلام السياسي يبغي استبدال الإسلام- كمنظومة حياة- بالحداثة, من أجل استرداد ماضيه الذهبي السابق عليها; حيث الأمر لا يتجاوز مجرد استخدام الإسلام والحداثة معا من أجل بناء وتثبيت أيديولوجيا سياسية, لا تختلف عن غيرها من أيديولوجيات مناوئة إلا من حيث نوع القناع التي تتخفي خلفه ↗
The mistake our politicians so often make with these industry leaders is in thinking they are interested in, or respectful of, the power of government. All they want is to keep stealing. If you can offer them the government’s seal of approval on that, they’ll take it. But if you can’t, well, they’ll take that too. ↗
It is true that some secluded intellectuals in their esoteric circles talk differently. They proclaim the priority of what they call eternal absolute values and feign in their declamations—not in their personal conduct—a disdain of things secular and transitory. But the public ignores such utterances. The main goal of present-day political action is to secure for the respective pressure group memberships the highest material well-being. The only way for a leader to succeed is to instill in people the conviction that his program best serves the attainment of this goal. ↗
Without exception all political parties promise their supporters a higher real income. There is no difference in this respect between nationalists and internationalists and between the supporters of a market economy and the advocates of either socialism or interventionism. If a party asks its supporters to make sacrifices for its cause, it always explains these sacrifices as the necessary temporary means for the attainment of the ultimate goal, the improvement of the material well-being of its members. Each party considers it as an insidious plot against its prestige and its survival if somebody ventures to question the capacity of its projects to make the group members more prosperous. Each party regards with a deadly hatred the economists embarking upon such a critique. ↗
In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs competing for domination on one small planet: the first deifies Jesus Christ, the other Karl Marx. Neither has much practical interest in what those two sincere and hard-working fellows actually preached. ↗
