Political Figures Quotes & Sayings

You don't doubt that the lobby supporting the enactment of same sex-marriage laws in different states is politically powerful, do you? ... As far as I can tell, political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case. — John Roberts

To buy TV time and bypass the usual filters between the public and political figures, are very powerful devices that people can use to attract attention, attract voters. And get influence in our society. — Alexander Stille

Nationalist, anti-European, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim public political figures, seem a worrying picture of a possible European future. We could still fall back into pre-Europe ... and it worries me. — Tony Judt

Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are far more important symbols than any politician today, and they occupy the space that iconic political figures did in earlier eras. — Fareed Zakaria

A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman. — Russell Baker

Our political leaders must be honest and forthcoming with data that will allow citizens to use facts and figures to judge for themselves what state Social Security is in. — Grace Napolitano

Indeed, several leading figures of the founding period, such as Patrick Henry, John Marshall, and Thomas Jefferson, proposed intermarriage between whites and Indians as a way to integrate the natives into the American mainstream. "What they thought impossible with respect to blacks," political scientist Ralph Lerner writes, "was seen as highly desirable with respect to Indians."19 — Dinesh D'Souza

people who have made India awesome aren't all politicians. Most of the people that did this are not from the government. Whether it is entrepreneurs like J.R.D. Tata and N.R. Narayana Murthy, sportspersons like Sachin Tendulkar or musicians like A.R. Rahman, people from all walks of life have helped improve our nation. Not just celebrities, but E. Sreedharan, responsible for the Delhi Metro, and Dr Verghese Kurien, who created the Amul revolution, were all ordinary people doing their work extraordinarily well. Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda, two of the most influential figures in India's history, never held political office. Aim to be one of those people who made India awesome. — Chetan Bhagat

I don't call myself a political figure but I'm taken to be. — Muhammad Ali

The birthday celebrations in Sergiyev Posad emphasized St. Sergius's role in shaping a unified Russia, a narrative that dovetails with the nationalism and conservative morals that Mr. Putin espouses. Some historians and church figures are crying foul, however, over what they say are the Kremlin's efforts to reshape the saint's legacy to enhance political goals, fostering what one critic called an official cult. — Anonymous

When political figures are shown on television or in movies, it's always the liberal Democrats that are shown to be humane, caring people. — Pat Boone

When reading about what may be described as the lesser celebrated heroic figures of the Harlem Renaissance, we rarely get a definitive look at just how complicated and sometimes dangerous their everyday lives were. In fact, until the past ten years, many defined the period primarily by its well-known literary, musical, and artistic elements while overlooking the fact there was any political component to it at all. — Aberjhani

Religious people should always be wary of the ways in which political power is wielded and skeptical of how economic privileges are distributed. They should also be mindful of how their own traditions have been used for narrow political purposes, and how some religious figures have manipulated the faith to aggrandize their own power. The doctrine of original sin and the idea of a fallen side of human nature apply to people who are religious no less than those who are not. — E.J. Dionne Jr.

I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators 'the haute couture of language.' — Anna Deavere Smith

While an increasing number of male academic, political, and cultural figures have felt comfortable enough in recent years to proclaim themselves feminists, absorbing aspects of feminist politics and theory into their thinking, their gestures are most often built on an essentialized and static dichotomy between men and women. But men must do more than admit their complicity in patriarchy; they must begin to rethink the very boundaries that shape and define what it means to be a man.

Conversely, women must play an important part in this reevaluation, an idea suggest by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwikc's admonition that "when something is about masculinity, it isn't always 'about men'." Far from being just about men, the idea of masculinity engages, inflects, and shapes everyone. — Maurice Berger

Castro has lived almost his entire life as a clandestine revolutionary. To such figures, truth is always malleable, always subservient to political goals. — Stephen Kinzer

Anyway, the way political history is passed down is influenced and spoiled by the closeness of the writers to the political figures that they're writing about. It's a sad state of affairs, but there's probably more veracity of reporting in my work than there is in the newspapers. — Raymond Pettibon

The thing political figures fear most is a terror event that will ruin their careers. The biggest thing they fear is that a bomb goes off and it can be traced to something they did or didn't do, an action they did or didn't support. They all fear being accused of not doing enough to keep the citizenry safe. — Peggy Noonan

Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers ... How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? — Robert Jensen

AIDS is big business, maybe Africa's biggest business. There's nothing else that can generate as much aid money as shocking figures on AIDS. AIDS is a political disease here, and we should be very skeptical. — James Shikwati

Sexual distortions carry strong undertones of prejudice - sexism, racism and homophobia - that rob individuals of their individuality. Common stereotypes include "men are all dogs," "women are less interested in sex," "gays are promiscuous," certain races are frigid or hung, and certain sex acts are indulgent, effeminate, or immoral. Other distortions clearly function as tools of organizations or of religious or political figures to shape public opinion through dogma and to control their followers' lives. — Alexandra Katehakis

I had never supported a political figure - and I went out and supported Obama. — Will Ferrell

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues. — Thomas L. Friedman

In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor. — P. J. O'Rourke

If elementary training in neighbor love focuses on family and friends, in secondary neighbor-love studies, we learn to see the outlier, the outsider, the outcast, the stranger, the alien, and even the enemy as neighbors too. Such an education can be deeply subversive, some might even say unpatriotic. After all, political figures, military leaders, and rising demagogues consistently consolidate power by scapegoating and dehumanizing an outsider, an outcast, or an enemy. But — Brian McLaren

When you have a liberal class that no longer functions, when those people who traditionally defend and care about a civil society no longer do so, then you cede power to very frightening, deformed figures, all of which we are watching leap up around the fringes of our political establishment - this lunatic fringe, which has largely taken over the Republican Party. — Chris Hedges

Political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much. — Paul Krugman

If I were to give you a list of names of the people, world political figures, who have been assisted by the CIA, and even assisted to office around the world, you'd be astonished and probably wouldn't believe it. But it's very long, and the names are very distinguished. — Charles McCarry

It's a dreadfully long monster of a book, and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent - no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors - whom I've never heard of - have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be sure I won't waste time reading such rubbish. — Robert Shea

The Beijing government avidly asserts its control over matters of reincarnation as a way of securing the loyalty and political complexion of influential Tibetan figures. — Evan Osnos

From my intimate discussions with President Obama, it is evident that India figures significantly in American geo-political, economic and strategic thinking. India is the largest democracy in the world. — Narendra Modi

It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions. — Roland Barthes

Even when influential political and media figures vehemently complained about the criticisms I wrote, Salon's editors unfailingly stood behind my work. — Glenn Greenwald

It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status. — Howard Zinn

Certain political figures think when you call them and ask them for a comment; that you are somehow doing something that you shouldn't be doing. — Bob Woodward

John Milton has, since his own lifetime, always been one of the major figures in English literature, but his reputation has changed constantly. He has been seen as a political opportunist, an advocate of 'immorality' (he wrote in favour of divorce and married three times), an over-serious classicist, and an arrogant believer in his own greatness as a poet. He was all these things. But, above all, Milton's was the last great liberal intelligence of the English Renaissance. The values expressed in all his works are the values of tolerance, freedom and self-determination, expressed by Shakespeare, Hooker and Donne. The basis of his aesthetic studies was classical, but the modernity of his intellectual interests can be seen in the fact that he went to Italy (in the late 1630s) where he met the astronomer Galileo, who had been condemned as a heretic by the Catholic church for saying the earth moved around the sun. — Ronald Carter

That moment was very important because it was political. That's what has to be done, so they struck a deal. She figures his is a well-thought-out motivation that she felt was worthy trade-off. The motivation here is survival, and she has to think like a leader. — Mary McDonnell

The cloud of doubt that surrounds political figures tends to remain and never dissipate or be clarified. — Bob Woodward

It would be unthinkable in Canadian public life today for the public inauguration of our supreme political figures to be accompanied by prayer. — Stockwell Day

The question is gonna be, what is the pope doing? For whom is the pope doing it, if the pope is doing it for anybody? But that's gonna be what it boils down to: What is the pope doing here? Why? And I'll tell you this. The more establishment figures - and the pope qualifies as an institutional leader, and therefore the pope would qualify in many people's eyes as an establishment figure, particularly this pope, who has not hidden his ideological alignment, much less his political alignment. — Rush Limbaugh

By remaining behind the scenes, they (the Rothschilds) were able to avoid the brunt of public anger which was directed, instead, at the political figures which they largely controlled. This is a technique which has been practiced by financial manipulators ever since, and it is fully utilized by those who operate the Federal Reserve System today. — G. Edward Griffin

Pragmatic political figures are sometimes called "moderate" or "middle of the road" because of their willingness to compromise. But the term "moderate" gives the false impression that there is a linear political continuum, with people distributed along it. The continuum metaphor hides the major role played by moral systems and the fact that pragmatic politicians in America are usually pragmatic versions of either liberals or conservatives. Not — George Lakoff

This is an area where North Carolina does excel. I have known more colorful North Carolina political figures than I have colorless ones. — Jesse Helms

You know, I guess I'm like any other political figure: Everybody wants to be loved. — George W. Bush

The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: one of the choice ones of the earth. — Jon Meacham