#politic

Everything we know about human nature and about government tells us that individuals using their own money will achieve far more good for themselves and far more for others than politicians spending money they didn't have to work to earn. ↗

— Harry Browne

#achieve #earn #everything #far #good

Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free. ↗

— Harry Browne

#become #bigger #children #either #family

As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release. ↗

— Jackson Browne

#also #as far as #birthday #call #calling

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics. ↗

— Charles Bukowski

#begin #else #grandiose #man #politics

I think Karl Rove saw that in George W. Bush early on and understood the impact that he could have on Texas politics and probably on national politics. ↗

— Ed Gillespie

#could #early #george #george w #i

I like politics. I like traveling in the United States. ↗

— Laura Bush

#like #politics #states #traveling #united

No quality imparts apparent strength to its possessors more effectively than faith. From hospital beds to battlefields, it is the iron that strengthens a man to confront his destiny. ↗

— Mike Corbett

#demons #heaven #hell #intelligent-humor #irreverent-humor

The Procrustean bed. . .suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There's just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it. ↗

— Anne Fadiman

#culture-wars #political-correctness #procrustes #censorship

You're not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more," said Yo-less. "It's speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#euphemism #humour #political-correctness #humour

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#change