#politics

The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#both-sides #opponents #politics #understanding #courage

It’s scary to be a woman on a blind date. For all she knows the man she is meeting up with could be a rapist, a murderer, or, God forbid, a politician. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#funny #murderer #politician #politics #rapist

In the early ages of the world, according to the scripture chronology, there were no kings; the consequence of which was there were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion. ↗

— Thomas Paine

#age

Here are my politics: I love music and painting; a good book is an event for me; I’m going on forty-four. How much time do I have left? Fifteen, twenty, thirty years at most? Very well! I maintain that in thirty years ministers will be a bit shrewder, but just about as honest as they are today. ↗

— Stendhal

#love

Uniformity in the common law, consisting of broad principles like the "reasonable person" standard, generally permits adjustment for the circumstances. This type of uniform principle is almost synonymous with fairness. Uniform application of a detailed rule, on the other hand, will almost always favor one group over another. p. 34 ↗

— Philip K. Howard

#common-law #fairness #government #law #politics

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. - Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993 ↗

— Toni Morrison

#politics #design

The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men. ↗

— Samuel Adams

#design

Illinois preschoolers were temporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk. ↗

— Barack Obama

#politics #dreams

And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way. ↗

— Barack Obama

#war #dreams

The anarch is oriented to facts, not ideas. He fights alone, as a free man, and would never dream of sacrificing himself to having one inadequacy supplant another and a new regime triumph over the old one. In this sense, he is closer to the philistine; the baker whose chief concern is to bake good bread; the peasant, who works his plow while armies march across his fields. ↗

— Ernst Jünger

#anarchy #ernst-jünger #facts-and-ideas #politics #dreams