Politics
Free government is founded on jealousy and not on confidence.
Thomas Jefferson
His facts are always either untrue or exaggerated, but never wrong.
Will the last soldier out of Vietnam please turn out the light at the end of the tunnel?
When conversing with people, you can tell them what they want to hear, what you want them to hear, or the truth.
Honesty is the second best policy. The best policy is to evade the question.
Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.
Barney Frank
I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to understand it anymore!
Sid Schwab about teabaggers
When forced to defend their ideas rationally, the right-wingers always come off looking like fools. It's just a pity they aren't forced to do it more often.
Jason Rosenhouse about Prop 8
Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity.
Sydney J. Harris
We must not murder people for crimes we think they might commit one day, or for making unfortunate associations with people who committed or might commit crimes. We need to be better than a jealous husband who beats his wife for looking at another man. Punishments must follow transgressions, not precede them. We must be governed by the rule of law, not the rule of statistics, not the rule of suspicion.
Speedwell
Although it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
G. K. Chesterton
When you say I don't care about the right to privacy because I have nothing to hide, that is no different than saying I don't care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say or freedom of the press because I have nothing to write.
Edward Snowden
We’re in this bizarre position where we’re defending the civil liberties of the country against the government. I mean, I never expected to be in this position. The government should always be the one defending civil liberties, and yet there’s a role reversal here. I still feel like I’m in another world, that I’m in this bad dream.
Tim Cook, Apple CEO
He talks as if periods between sentences are a liberal conspiracy.
Democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right.
Barack Obama
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
Elie Wiesel
I can tell you where to find Reagan Republicans: Go to a cemetery in Oakland County, Michigan. That’s where you find ’em.
Stuart Stevens
We feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.
Hillary Rodham - Wellesley Commencement Speech 1969
Evil seldom arrives in a big box, wrapped in a bow, labeled “evil”. Instead, it works in small and subtle ways, overtaking a society slowly but surely, working its way through those grey zones where people can’t see clearly, where they aren’t quite sure what it is they are dealing with, till, when they finally figure it out, it’s too late.
Hannah Arendt
I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.
Rachel Maddow, D.Phil.
Boys will be boys. But boys will not be President.
Ronald Reagan
Democracy is entirely based on political compromises.
John Gruber
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
L.P. Hartley
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
As Democracy is perfected, the office of the 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 hearts desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.
H. L. Mencken
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
Ansel Adams
If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.
Samuel Adams, revolutionary (1722-1803)
I learned compassion from being discriminated against. Everything bad that's ever happened to me has taught me compassion.
Ellen DeGeneres
The most certain test by which we can judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
Lord Acton
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Hermann Göring
Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.
not Benjamin Franklin
Once or twice in every generation a line is crossed so egregiously that where you stood on the issue will forever define you.
Kara Vallow
It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
J.R.R. Tolkien
To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there's more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged.
Norman Mailer
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Frederick Douglass
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
Frederick Douglass
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Frederick Douglass
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
Frederick Douglass
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.
Frederick Douglass
The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right. And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.
Thomas Jefferson
History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.
Thurgood Marshall
True patriotism springs from a belief in the dignity of the individual, freedom and equality not only for Americans but for all people on earth, universal brotherhood and good will, and a constant and earnest striving toward the principles and ideals on which this country was founded.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.
Dr. Seuss
The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.
James Madison
She was warned. Nevertheless, she persisted.
Mitch McConnell
For most Republicans, their beliefs are not a logical conclusion, they are a mode of living. And the erosion of that belief will typically not, for better or for worse, be accomplished by the presentation and examination of evidence; it will be through telling a better story than the ones told by talk radio and Fox News. One that helps make sense of the world, provides a template for a fulfilling life, explains the difference between right and wrong, and brings meaning to people’s experiences.
Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.
Rep Raul Labrador (R-ID)
Every day, every single day, you wake up and think it cannot possibly be getting worse—and then it does.
There are few evasions more transparent than denying what no one accused you of doing.
Garry Kasparov
If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth?’
Donald J. Trump
What Did He Not Know And When Did He Not Know It?
”Nothing to hide“ only works if the folks in power share the values of you, and everyone you know, now and always will.
Tom Scott
If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.
Heather Heyer
I don’t care what you are, I care about what you did.
Jay Smooth
As far as I can tell, the chief goal of Fox & Friends is to help its viewers start their days secure in the knowledge that someone in the world is dumber than they are.
Justin Peteres
The worst thing that can happen in a democracy -- as well as in an individual's life -- is to become cynical about the future and lose hope: that is the end, and we cannot let that happen.
Hillary Clinton
The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.
W.E.B. Du Bois
There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.
William Jennings Bryan
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Rights and Sentiments (1845)
When did it become okay to be more offended by what someone with no power says than by what someone with power does?
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
George Orwell
In a modern, moral, and wealthy society; no person in America should be too poor to live.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive.
Steve Jobs
Never attribute to treason that which can adequately be explained by simple criminal activity.
Some Farker
Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
Haile Selassie
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Culture should never be accepted as an excuse for the oppression of women.
Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström
There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.
Randall Monroe (XKCD)
Impeachment is not about punishment.
Impeachment is about cleansing the office.
Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.
Lindsey Graham
I would encourage people to look around them in their community and find an organization that is doing something that they believe in, even if that organization has only five people, or ten people, or twenty people, or a hundred people. And to look at history and understand that when change takes place it takes place as a result of large, large numbers of people doing little things unbeknownst to one another. And that history is very important for people to not get discouraged. … History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.
Howard Zinn
There's never just one. Never.
When they go low, we go high.
First Lady Michelle Obama
When they go low, we kick ‘em in the nuts.
Sean Clegg
When they go low, I say we hit harder.
Michael Avenatti
There is one tradition in America I am proud to inherit. It is our first freedom and the truest expression of our Americanism: the ability to dissent without fear. It is our right to utter the words, "I disagree." We must feel at liberty to speak those words to our neighbors, our clergy, our educators, our news media, our lawmakers and, above all, to the one among us we elect President.
Natalie Merchant
It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.
General William Tecumseh Sherman
If you’re ever tempted to think that voting doesn’t matter consider the lengths to which the Republicans go in order to stop people from voting.
Birds of a feather...blot out the sky.
Charles P. Pierce
Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. In saying ‘Our interests first, whatever happens to the others,’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great and that which is most important: Its moral values.
French President Emmanuel Macron
I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.
Warren G. Harding, 29th president of the USA
If we are going to have crazy in our elections, I want that crazy to be made in America.
Asha Rangappa
NEWSFLASH I wasn’t asking for permission.
US Representative Elise Stefanik
We’re gonna go in there and impeach the motherfucker.
Rashida Tlaib
None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
I would urge many of you to break out of your cloistered intellectual dead ends. Put down the Atlas Shrugged. Read about alternative solutions. Expand your minds. Your hearts will follow.
Jeffrey Parks MD FACS
Liberals tend to think you should be able to do what you want as long as it doesn’t hurt other people.
Conservatives think you should be able to do what you want as long as they, personally, enjoy and approve of the activity.
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
James Baldwin
He serves his party best who serves the country best.
Rutherford B. Hayes
I think we just don't know how to handle having a president who commits all his crimes and impeachable offenses in public.
Seth Abramson
Even in cases of presidential impeachment, a House resolution has never, in fact, been required to begin an impeachment inquiry.
Chief Judge of the District Court for the District of Columbia Beryl Howell
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it control itself.
James Madison
I have NO IDEA what will have happened by the time I wake up, but it will almost certainly be bad.
Elie Mystal
All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.
Sarah Moore Grimke, abolitionist (1792-1873)
In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics”. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
George Orwell
Pay attention to things you are not allowed to say, they tell you what is at stake.
Maya Forstater
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
Marie Shear
If America was the great country we aim to be, it would not be profitable to spew lies and propaganda.
…freedom to express our beliefs cannot be restricted to the inoffensive or anodyne.
Maya Forstater’s Lawyers
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell
Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.
Sedley LJ
A grand jury does tend to concentrate the mind.
Plagiarism of Samuel Johnson’s phrase.
They told you to reject the evidence of your own eyes. It was their final, most essential command
George Orwell
There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language
George Orwell
Statues and other forms of historical memory say nothing about the person or event. They say everything about the people who chose to remember that person or event at a given time.
Erik Loomis
The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
Selwyn Duke
A government, like an individual, spends money for any or all of three reasons: because it needs to, because it wants to, or simply because it has to spend. The last is much the shabbiest.
Nero Wolfe
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
Steve Biko
Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.
John Lewis speaking atop the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 1, 2020
You may not like what you hear in an “open exchange of ideas”, but all the more reason you need to hear it.
Carilyn Johnson
@CarilynJohnson