#side

Being President is like being the groundskeeper in a cemetery: there are a lot of people under you, but none of them are listening. ↗

— Bill Clinton

#politics #president

If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. -Nelson Mandela, activist, South African president, Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1918) ↗

— Nelson Mandela

#enemies #justice #partners #peace #politics

President Bartlet: There's a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken in the Blue Room. You wouldn't think you could find a group of people more arrogant than the fifteen of us, but there they are, right upstairs in the Blue Room. ↗

— Aaron Sorkin

#president

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. ↗

— Barack Obama

#president

Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the President. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin. ↗

— David Letterman

#president

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#elite #elitism #elitist #meritocracy #politics

The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#dangerous-world #law #legalize #marijuana #marijuana-reconsidered

Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language. ↗

— Jean Webster

#lonely #out-of-place #outcast #outsider #lonely

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ↗

— Paulo Freire

#conflict #hands #means #neutral #powerful

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. --as quoted in THE RIVER OF WINGED DREAMS ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#angels #civil-war #democracy #destiny #determination