#politics

Not only may you not enter the state without certification: you are, in the eyes of the state, not dead until you are certified dead; and you can be certified dead only by an officer who himself (herself) holds state certification. The state pursues the certification of death with extraordinary thoroughness—witness the dispatch of a host of forensic scientists and bureaucrats to scrutinize and photograph and prod and poke the mountain of human corpses left behind by the great tsunami of December 2004 in order to establish their individual identities. No expense is spared to ensure that the census of subjects shall be complete and accurate. Whether the citizen lives or dies is not a concern of the state. What matters to the state and its records is whether the citizen is alive or dead. ↗

— J.M. Coetzee

#death

Our politics are our deepest form of expression: they mirror our past experiences and reflect our dreams and aspirations for the future. ↗

— Paul Wellstone

#deepest #dreams #experiences #expression #form

Politics is about the improvement of people's lives. It's about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and the world. Politics is about doing well for the people. ↗

— Paul Wellstone

#advancing #cause #country #doing #for the people

It is the belief that extremes and excesses of inequality must be reduced so that each person is free to fully develop his or her full potential. This is why we take precious time out of our lives and give it to politics. ↗

— Paul Wellstone

#develop #each #excesses #extremes #free

Politics is not about money. ↗

— Paul Wellstone

#money #politics

Politics is not about power. ↗

— Paul Wellstone

#about #politics

Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning. ↗

— Paul Wellstone

#politics #sake #winning

Politics is not predictions and politics is not observations. Politics is what we do. Politics is what we do, politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope for and what we dare to imagine. ↗

— Paul Wellstone

#dare #hope #imagine #observations #politics

There's a tendency in politics to attribute bad motivation much too quickly, and the sooner you attribute bad motivation to someone you disagree with, the harder it is to find some common ground to make some progress that would give people confidence that you got it more right than wrong. ↗

— Peter Welch

#bad #common #common ground #confidence #disagree

There's no conscious plan here; my whole life in politics as a state legislator and in Congress has been about strengthening the middle class. ↗

— Peter Welch

#been #class #congress #conscious #here