Political Engagement Quotes & Sayings

As an artist who lives here and wants a more sophisticated engagement between local social dynamics and global discourse, it's great to see that reflected via the relationships we've developed with our customers. For some people it's a political act to eat from us three days a week because they recognize they are financially supporting the premise of the project each time they come. 95% of our annual revenue is purely from the public via food sales. — Jon Rubin

interconnected vision for sociology as science and sociology as political engagement is not well understood, — David L. Swartz

Bloy was the ultimate weapon against the twentieth century, its mediocrity, its moronic 'engagement,' its cloying humanitarianism; against Sartre, and Camus, and all their political playacting; and against all those sickening formalists, the nouveau roman, the pointless absurdity of it all. — Michel Houellebecq

Since taking office, I've made it clear that the United States was prepared to begin a new chapter of engagement with the Islamic Republic of Iran. We offered the Iranian government a clear choice. It could fulfill its international obligations and realize greater security, deeper economic and political integration with the world, and a better future for all Iranians. Or it could continue to flout its responsibilities and face even more pressure and isolation. — Barack Obama

Grassroots Tea Party activism therefore marries participatory engagement and considerable learning about the workings of government with factually ungrounded beliefs about the content of policies. If people actively engage in the political process but on mistaken premises, is that good or bad for democracy? Our heads are left spinning. — Theda Skocpol

I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America. — Rebecca Solnit

I'm home and safe and filled with the comfort of being somewhere I've already been. The ruckus of homecoming is brutally enjoyable and everyone makes me feel like a champion. And all I had to do was stay away long enough. — Miguel Syjuco

I believe that women should have equal rights to education, to work and to civic and political engagement. — Rashid Al-Ghannushi

I am ready to have dialogue with the concerned parties once the nation is calm and the political temperatures are lowered enough for constructive and productive engagement. — Mwai Kibaki

I know where I'm supposed to be at the time of the snap. Now, where the play dictates I'm going to go is a different story. — Troy Polamalu

We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act. — Octavio Paz

The most important political office is that of private citizen. — Louis D. Brandeis

In 2012, I see the potential for people to come together, huge moments of political and social engagement where elections are part of the strategy for change, but not the end goal and not the only thing that matters. — Olivia Wilde

First of all, everyone must acknowledge and feel that child slavery still exists in the world, in its ugliest face and form. And this is an evil, which is crime against humanity, which is intolerable, which is unacceptable and which must go. That sense of recognition must be developed first of all. And secondly there is a need of higher amounts of political will. There is a need of higher amount of corporate engagement, and the engagement of the public towards it. So, everybody has a responsibility to save and protect the children on this planet. — Kailash Satyarthi

Rosa reports the engagement of her niece in 1912 to a nice young man without a name. It may therefore be that the last descendants of the Luxemburg family are living somewhere in England. — John Peter Nettl

To have internal peace and stability and economic development, it is important to have good relations with the political parties that we have in our country. That is why we have had engagement with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. — Thein Sein

Emma's mid-twenties had brought a second adolescence even more self-absorbed and doom-laden than the first one. 'Why don't you just come home, sweetheart?' her mum had said on the phone last night, using her quavering, concerned voice, as if her daughter had been abducted. 'Your room's still here. There's jobs at Debenhams' - and for the first time she had been tempted.
Once, she thought she could conquer London. She had imagined a whirl of literary salons, political engagement, larky parties, bittersweet romances conducted on Thames embankments. She had intended to form a band, make short films, write novels, but two years on slim volume of verse was no fatter, and nothing really good had happened to her since she'd been baton-charged at Poll Tax Riots. — David Nicholls

Conflict avoidance often causes greater conflict. — Bryant McGill

Our marvelous new information technologies boost our power and opportunities for political engagement, but they can also disempower us by contributing to extreme political mobilization that sometimes overwhelms our institutions. These institutions were designed for rural societies operation at a tiny fraction of today's speed and with a citizenry vastly less capable that today's. It's unclear how they will change to adapt to the new reality, but change they must. — Thomas Homer-Dixon

To beautify the world, let your love bloom like a flower. — Debasish Mridha

Civic engagement means working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes. — Thomas Ehrlich

I think (the internet) is contributing to Chinese political engagement..access to the outside world is preventing more censorship. — Bill Gates

Marriage is the operation by which a woman's vanity and a man's egotism are extracted without an anaesthetic. — Helen Rowland

I can't compete and when I do, the rules of engagement change in the middle of the game. I'll let the powers that be vanquish themselves and return in three to five years to sift through the remains. — Ayn Rand

Anything was possible. Everything was uncertain. But I knew one thing for sure: I'd bounced back before, and I would do it again and again and again. Because that's the only choice there is. And as many things as I still had to lose, I had just as many more left to find. — Katherine Center

He stretches his legs out underneath the table and checks Facebook on his phone. It tells him things he doesn't need to know about people he hasn't seen in years. He absorbs their aggressively worded opinions and quasi-political hate-speak. He sees a photograph of his ex-girlfriend with her new boyfriend smiling at a picnic and he realises, with a strange cascade of emptiness, that she is pregnant and wearing an engagement ring. The comments are jubilant. He reads every word before he forces himself to put his phone down. A loneliness descends. He feels its familiar talons grabbing him violently out of his chair and hanging him, swinging, up by the ceiling. Pete — Kate Tempest

The whole thing of doing a TV series, I find it very daunting not knowing where the story's going. — Danny Huston

But the consequences of the whole-hearted and uncritical embrace of politics by Christians has been, IN EFFECT, to reduce Christian faith to a political ideology and various Christian denominations and para-church organizations as special interest groups. The political engagement of the various Christian groups is certainly legal, but in ways that are undoubtedly unintended, it has also been counterproductive of the ends to which they aspire. — James Davison Hunter

2009: e-mails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act revealed that White House Associate Director of Public Engagement was arranging an NEA-hosted telephone conference with tax-supported artists to encourage the creation of propaganda art to generate public support for President Obama's political agendas. — Alexandra York

One of the great dangers in political engagement is misplaced hope. — Shane Claiborne

Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that mazeis itself an enslavement for it voids every alternate and binds one ever more tightly in to the constraints that make a life. — Cormac McCarthy