Political Radicalism Quotes & Sayings

Begin with the soft smelted upturned heart-shaped mouth made for smiling a smile kept for kindness, tenderness, incapable of malice.
Am I going too fast for you?
The almond eyes see out through their sleepy epicanthic fold. Trusting and calm, if a flicker from slowness, a further flicker from stupidity.
Settled in slow-motion beauty, heart-breaking beauty. — Craig Raine

Despite what many nutritionists have preached for years, rapid weight-loss diets can be healthy if done correctly and can work wonders on reducing pounds and inches in just days. — Mike Moreno

Not long ago, having expressed some disagreements in print with an old comrade of long standing, I was sent a response that he had published in an obscure newspaper. This riposte referred to my opinions as 'racist.' I would obviously scorn to deny such an allegation on my own behalf. I would, rather, prefer to repudiate it on behalf of my former friend. He had known me for many years and cooperated with me on numerous projects, and I am quite confident that he would never have as a collaborator anyone he suspected of racial prejudice. But it does remind me, and not for the first time, that quarrels on the left have a tendency to become miniature treason trials, replete with all kinds of denunciation. There's a general tendency - not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with them - to believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one. — Christopher Hitchens

The radio is not for listening to. It is for displaying in the kitchen, so that invited guests will consider you an intellectual."
- Tony Bulmer — Tony Bulmer

Fertility of the soil is the future of civilization. — Albert Howard

Scattered across the Roman Empire, it was only natural for the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jewish independence movement by erasing, as much as possible, any hint of radicalism or violence, revolution or zealotry, from the story of Jesus, and to adapt Jesus's words and actions to the new political situation in which they found themselves. — Reza Aslan

Accuse American businessmen of being responsible for radicalism and they would indignantly deny the accusation. Yet, in one fundamental sense, they are responsible. They are responsible in the sense that they have utterly neglected to take part in the work and the organization which precede the choosing of candidates for political office. Local political organizations all over the land are conducted and controlled, as a rule, by politicians ... Businessmen have shirked such responsibilities, leaving an untrammeled field to others less capable of carrying on the administration of government. — B.C. Forbes

To this point, musical repetition has been viewed as a particular kind of object. But it can also be viewed as a particular kind of behavior. — Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

July 4th ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion. — John Adams

I would like to say that, as the protester finished his shower, I was disturbed by the contradiction between my avowed political materialism and my inexperience with this brand of making, of poeisis, but I could dodge or dampen that contradiction via my hatred of Brooklyn's boutique biopolitics, in which spending obscene sums and endless hours on stylized food preparation somehow enabled the conflation of self-care and political radicalism. — Ben Lerner

When I opened the gate, I found myself facing Avi Keinan, CEO of the "Treasures of the Dead Sea" factory, accompanied by Ricki, head of the administration department; both have been working with my husband Kobi for many years. Every time they came to town and had some time to kill between two meetings, they dropped by for a quick coffee. — Dalia Rosenfeld

It is undoubtedly true that religion is often socially conservative. By binding a people together under a shared God, a common cosmology and a common morality, religion creates order and stability and its rituals create social cohesio ... n. By promising to the pious poor rewards in the next life, it reconciles them to their fate in this one and thus discourages them from rebelling against their condition ...
[also] religion [is] an inspiration to radicalism and rebellion. religion is a potential threat to any political or social order because it claims an authority higher than any available in this world. pp. 10-11 — Steve Bruce

But nowadays -- Our weakness for the last few years has been the ineffectiveness of the Opposition. This Labour Party has never had the quality of a fighting Opposition. It has just sucked the life out of Radicalism. It has never had the definite idealism of the Whigs and Liberals. 'Give us more employment and slightly higher pay and be sure of our contentment,' says Labour. 'We're loyal. We know our place. But we don't like being unemployed.' What good is that as Opposition? It's about as much opposition as a mewing cat. We mean more than that. I tell you frankly. Our task, I take it, my task, is to reinstate that practical working Opposition which has always been Old England's alternative line of defence... For the good of all of us... — H.G.Wells

Love can sun the realms of night. — Friedrich Schiller

In college I studied '60s and '70s radicalism, student activism, forms of political violence, groups like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the New Left. — Marisha Pessl

The Church, like the monarchy, was a valuable bastion of defense against the dangerous alliance of atheistical philosophy with political radicalism. The Bible taught the poorer orders that their lowly path had been allotted to them by the hand of God, and the Church was there to make quite certain they understood that. — C.S. Harris

It seems weird to me that here we are, alive, not knowing why we are alive, and just going about our business, sort of ignoring that fact. How are we all not looking at each other all the time just like, Yo, what the fuck? — Melissa Broder

WHAT AM I? I howled at him as he retreated. A voice, deathly familiar, prickled at the back of my mind, instilling a sense of calm that came from deep inside, an answer to a question that was asked and answered somewhere in the depths of me. Soul eater, it said in a raspy, whispering voice. Succubus. — Robert J. Crane

The Beats were tremendously significant, but chiefly in the way that they provided a preview in the 1950s of the cultural, intellectual, and moral disasters that would fully flower in the late 1960s. The ideas of the Beats, their sensibility, contained in ovo all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the naive political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come. — Roger Kimball

Every American, I think, should be able to fill out their taxes on a postcard. — Ted Cruz

A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase. — Bertrand Russell

If you hold your breath long enough, you're dead. If you give up and start breathing, you're mad. Isn't that so, Alice from Wonderland? — Cameron Jace

Most Romans believed that their system of government was the finest political invention of the human mind. Change was inconceivable. Indeed, the constitution's various parts were so mutually interdependent that reform within the rules was next to impossible. As a result, radicals found that they had little choice other than to set themselves beyond and against the law. This inflexibility had disastrous consequences as it became increasingly clear that the Roman state was incapable of responding adequately to the challenges it faced. Political debate became polarized into bitter conflicts, with radical outsiders trying to press change on conservative insiders who, in the teeth of all the evidence, believed that all was for the best under the best of all possible constitutions (16). — Anthony Everitt

So successful has the ideological-political-cultural purge been executed that it is hard indeed to find vigorous liberals, and no energetic, coherent and cogent leftists at all can find expression in our controlled media and educational systems. Forget about wholesale culture- or civilization-critics like Marxists. Universities have to be purged of any "radicalism" that can see through to the roots of issues and pathologies, for the same reasons that workers have to have nascent unions aborted among them and contrarian newspapers and media have to be starved of advertising. — Kenny Smith

Places are part of nature, of the bigger picture. We are interrelated. When we contemplate them in their own right, they can sometimes change our lives; they can become spiritual experiences. — Etel Adnan

Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. — John Taylor Gatto