#politic

But what a way to do things-never to perform a decent action until you are kicked into it and the rest of the world has ceased to believe that your motives can possibly be honest. ↗

— George Orwell

#politics #motivational

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#philosophy #politics #men

Saudis of all sorts recent having to beg princes for favors to secure services that should be a public right ↗

— Karen Elliott House

#religion

The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#justice #politics #rights #nature

Grammar is politics by other means. ↗

— Donna J. Haraway

#gender #grammar #linguistics #politics #nature

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil. ↗

— Eric Hoffer

#nature

On the 'Celestial Seasonings' green tea packet there is a short explanation of its benefits: 'Green tea is a natural source of antioxidants, which neutralize harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals. By taming free radicals, antioxidants help the body maintain its natural health.' Mutatis mutandis, is not the notion of totalitarianism one of the main ideological antioxidants, whose function throughout its career was to tame free radicals, and thus to help the social body to maintain its politico-ideological good health? ↗

— Slavoj Žižek

#politics #radical #totalitarianism #nature

Sound the tocsin of national peril and hordes of well-meaning folk with nothing much to do always materialize from nowhere. They itch to meddle in great matters of which their comprehension is usually pretty dim, and have no objection to getting their names and pictures in the papers. ↗

— Leslie McFarlane

#politics #nature

We dispute the arbitrary distribution of power and wealth, which is claimed as the natural order, but which is in fact not natural at all but rather artificially created and sustained by ancient privileges. ↗

— Kate Elliott

#politics #nature

...an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile? ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#nature #philosophy #political-science #political-theory #nature