Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it’s a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.
I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians.
I'm not Bonnie™ or Chloe. I'm the essence of her, the nontrademarked person the camera can never capture and my parents have no right to sign over. There is a sovereign nation encased in this skin that MetaReel can never trademark.
Nothing is so irretrievably lost to a society as the sense of fear it felt about a grave danger that was subsequently coped with.
Government could avoid having opinions about so many things if it would quit subsidizing so many things.
Not again, Draper," Frank sighed. "You're not going to stop us from crossing. You and I know that the one thing the Government does even more poorly than provide healthcare is secure its borders.
The most capricious modern entitlement is not just Social Security but to self-esteem.
Manipulating the media is akin to poisoning a nation’s water supply – it affects all of our lives in unimaginable ways.
If enough citizens believe their national security’s in jeopardy then politicians who propose wars will receive the support they need.
Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.
He turned the presidency – and the President's House – into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, of vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to li...
As politicians know all too well, even a Government that does not represent the wishes of a people can count on their support once the nation is locked in conflict with an external foe.
He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals
Leon reads aloud from an article in the about voting to select a national flower. Leon votes for dandelions. Joseph and Clyde vote for grass.
There's a sin, a fearful sin, resting on this nation, that will not go unpunished forever. There will be reckoning yet ... it may be sooner or it may be later, but it's a coming as sure as the Lord is just
The inherent prejudice in unnaturally-produced nationalism causes a form of cultural blindness, which prevents us from seeing the obvious ways we could co-exist in the world as a co-operative human family.
One less desirable aspect of democracy is that it seems to require serious demonization of the enemy if the nation and public opinion are to be galvanized sufficiently to pay a serious price in blood or treasure at war.
It’s disturbing to me that criminals are freely roaming the streets of our nation’s capital. I’m not talking about escaped prison inmates—I’m talking about politicians.
Workplace relations is about getting the best out of people. An argument which says that the only way we can compete with other nations in the world is engaging in a race to the bottom in terms of pay rates, penalty rates, protections on rosters, get...
Taxpayers have put more than $24 trillion on the line to resuscitate Wall Street after the economic meltdown of last year. With the help of this massive taxpayer support, the nation's largest banks are posting record profits.
The President's announcement sounded less like a national energy plan than like a page from an election-year play book. This Administration's plan to reduce obscene oil company profits is to regulate them less.
