Political Con Quotes & Sayings

To me, you have to declare yourself a Chicano in order to be a Chicano. That makes a Chicano a Mexican-American with a defiant political attitude that centers on his or her right to self-definition. I'm a Chicano because I say I am. — Cheech Marin

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.
If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along. — Carl Sagan

A masterly analysis of how political interests, economic circumstances, development strategies, and local history have shaped what are surprisingly different versions of the welfare state across the developing world. The authors combine fine-grained country analyses with intelligent use of data, and explain and extend the theory and literature on the modern welfare state. The book is both scholarly and readable. — Nancy Birdsall

The fantastic political and economic burdens imposed by that treaty have entirely disillusioned the German people and annihilated its belief in justice. — Adolf Hitler

[There is] a duty in refusing to cooperate in any undertaking that violates the Constitutional rights of the individual. This holds in particular for all inquisitions that are concerned with the private life and the political affiliations of the citizens. — Albert Einstein

Muslim leaders should ask themselves what exactly their relationship is to a political movement that encourages young men to kill and maim on religious grounds. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

All this shows that, as in the case of Theophilus, so also in that of Jerome, much of the Origenist controversy of that day depended on political considerations and on contingence. Much also rested on gross misunderstandings and even the lack of direct reading of Origen's works, or, even worse, according to Origen's and Rufinus's denunciations, the deliberate alteration of these works. (658) — Ilaria Ramelli

The United States is such a potent political, cultural, and economic model in the evocation of the contemporary world, that to come here, select some elements from the prototype and rearrange them, that's really interesting artistically. — Bruno Dumont

Population growth is straining the Earth's resources to the breaking point, and educating girls is the single most important factor in stabilizing that. That, plus helping women gain political and economic power and safeguarding their reproductive rights. — Al Gore

I firmly believe this ... that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing governments by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war and conquest. — Benjamin Franklin

If the Philippines must remain under the control of Spain, they will necessarily have to be transformed in a political sense, for the course of their history and the needs of their inhabitants so require. — Jose Rizal

The Forgotten Man ... delving away in patient industry, supporting his family, paying his taxes, casting his vote, supporting the church and the school ... but he is the only one for whom there is no provision in the great scramble and the big divide. Such is the Forgotten Man. He works, he votes, generally he prays-but his chief business in life is to pay ... Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all? — William Graham Sumner

If I wanted to go crazy I would do it in Washington because it would not be noticed — Irvin S. Cobb

This process of con-
tinuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but
to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films,
sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of lit-
erature or documentation which might conceivably hold
any political or ideological significance. Day by day and
almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. — George Orwell

The way the United States intelligence community operates is it doesn't limit itself to the protection of the homeland. It doesn't limit itself to countering terrorist threats, countering nuclear proliferation. It's also used for economic espionage, for political spying to gain some knowledge of what other countries are doing. — Edward Snowden

Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game. — Terence McKenna

Politics, in a sense, has always been a con game. — Joe McGinniss

We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life. — Jimmy Carter

When you've spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment, it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands. — Margaret Thatcher

Theo finally did something purely for his own pleasure. Pulling his laptop toward him, he logged into his guilty secret - a local political debate forum - and looked for people who were wrong. — Con Riley

Donald Trump is not a Republican. Donald Trump is not a conservative. Donald Trump is trying to pull off the biggest scam in American political history, basically a con job, where he's trying to take over the Republican Party by telling people he's someone who he is not. — Marco Rubio

We are hammered 24/7 with the "far left" and "far right" points of view, pounding us, beating us upside the head with purely political theatrics in order to make us believe it's real. It's not real. It's a con! — Bruce McDonald

The Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly said that America is not at war with Islam. And Republicans need to be vocal about condemning anyone, in America or abroad, who seeks to lump all Muslims together as America's enemies. America is not at war with Islam, and Republicans must continue to follow President Bush's example in condemning any expressions of prejudice against Muslims. — Margaret Hoover

The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy. — Timothy Noah

Washington has become our Versailles. We are ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers
and the media has evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception. — Chris Hedges

From this process has emerged a parallel process of translating traditional working and living values into a new political and economic power - a power increasingly based upon the strength of money and those material things money can purchase. — Alex Campbell

That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent. — Graham Greene

Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, directs them. — Lord Chesterfield

Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself.
The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself. — David Foster Wallace

The ignorant mass looks upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood; or at best, as upon an irresponsible lunatic. Yet nothing is further from the truth. As a matter of fact, those who have studied the character and personality of these men, or who have come in close contact with them, are agreed that it is their super-sensitiveness to the wrong and injustice surrounding them which compels them to pay the toll of our social crimes. The most noted writers and poets, discussing the psychology of political offenders, have paid them the highest tribute. Could anyone assume that these men had advised violence, or even approved of the acts? Certainly not. Theirs was the attitude of the social student, of the man who knows that beyond every violent act there is a vital cause. — Emma Goldman

Raising a daughter is an extremely political act in this culture. Mothers have been placed in a no-win situation with their daught ers: if they teach their daughters simply how to get along in a world that has been shaped by men and male desires, then they betray their daughters' potential But, if they do not, they leave their daughters adrift in a hostile world without survival strategies. — Elizabeth Debold

The immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible. It indicates not simple carelessness but a vivid drive toward destruction, decay and death: the stage-set of a literal "death trip," of a society determined to commit suicide. Far from being a mere matter of aesthetics, suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis - for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about. — James Howard Kunstler

Wherever arms flow, violence follows. Bullets replace ballots as the solution to political disputes. — Michael Douglas

And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. — Thomas Jefferson

Each of us should choose which course of action we must take; education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes, but let it not be said that we did nothing. — Ron Paul

China is thus following a path similar to that set by the United States after World War II, when it gave unstinting support to undemocratic governments in the Middle East on the promise of long-term access to low-priced oil-though without the huge arms transfers that accompanied, and remain a key component of, US political support. — Melvin Gurtov

The two pillars of 'political correctness' are, a) willful ignorance, and b) a steadfast refusal to face the truth. — George MacDonald Fraser

Especially now when views are becoming more polarized, we must work to understand each other across political, religious and national boundaries. — Jane Goodall

I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always does to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women from laughing at them. — John Fowles

The most serious political problem posed by filter bubbles is that they make it increasingly difficult to have a public argument. — Eli Pariser

'A sound Conservative government,' said Taper, musingly. 'I understand: Tory men and Whig measures.' — Benjamin Disraeli

From the vantage of a mid-1970's consensus that regarded the United States as having entered a post-Protestant era, the rise of a Religious Right dominated not only by Protestants but by fundamentalists was not the way the story was supposed to go. People like Jerry Falwell looked like party crashers who, rather than slikinking from bar to buffet in hopes of going unnoticed, demanded that the vegetarian, alcohol-imbibing hosts serve meat and tell the bartender to go home. — D.G. Hart

The most intriguing correlations obtained by the Minnesota study were also among the most unexpected. Social and political attitudes between twins reared apart were just as concordant as those between twins reared together: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. Religiosity and faith were also strikingly concordant: twins were either both faithful or both nonreligious. Traditionalism, or "willingness to yield to authority," was significantly correlated. So were characteristics such as "assertiveness, drive for leadership, and a taste for attention." Other — Siddhartha Mukherjee

China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentration or the dispersion of power? — Matt Ridley

Deliberation is not a particular type of speech, but a political act of collective decision-making in consideration of consequences. — F. David Mathews

I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman. — Arnold Schwarzenegger