An intellectual is going to have doubts, for example, about a fundamentalist religious doctrine that admits no doubt, about an imposed political system that allows no doubt, about a perfect aesthetic that has no room for doubt.
Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution.
Everyone's entitled to express their political beliefs. I don't presume to tell anybody who to vote for. I am comfortable telling people what my opinions are.
Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.
I assure this committee that, if I am confirmed, I will be strictly independent of all political influences... essential to that institution's ability to function effectively and achieve its mandated objectives.
A people numerically large may attain to ways of thought and enterprise that no political censure can reduce to a minimum; but under narrower conditions, it may easily come about that the whole people will fall asleep.
When I was first elected I was puzzled why they were holding events in my honor as a mere freshman. I asked myself, why is a federal entity so involved in political activity?
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
I must try desperately to absorb all information I can about the Middle East. I want to excel. I want to speak articulately about the politics of the Middle East and its religion.
The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes.
You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.
I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right cloth...
I had always been interested in politics. I had assumed, for a variety of - well, for two reasons, being Jewish and being gay back in the late '50s, early '60s - that I would never be elected or anything, but I would participate as an activist.
Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country's scared.
This is the way I think about politics: We want two diametrically opposed things from a politician. On one hand we want them to be bastions of moral integrity, perfect people, saints. And on the other hand, we want them to be effective leaders.
A lot of people have asked me whether I am a cynic or take a cynical view of politics and are often surprised when I say that I consider myself an optimist, but an optimist dressed in the robes of a realist.
Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.
I was in the room with, you know, more than a dozen Republicans trying to negotiate the stimulus. Most of them decided the politics of the situation meant they should walk away, even if it wasn't responsible in terms of what our country needed right ...
I'm always amazed how many politicians have a very unlikely story, and when I talk to groups of students, I remind them that not everybody who gets into politics is a lawyer or went to school to study it. We all come to it for different reasons.
A generation of Earth Days has conditioned millions of us to be green in our homes yet we must apply the same ethic to our politics if we want to save our planet and our democracy.
I like Ronald Reagan, who didn't play crass politics, and he just articulated and delivered on broad themes that were needed. Free markets meant free markets. Deregulation. Lower tax rates. Strong national defense. And he was credible and believable.
