Political Statement Quotes & Sayings

Everything a gay man does makes a political statement. Everything matters: where you bank, where you shop, where you eat. When you hold your lover's hand in public — Josh Lanyon

The Toothbrush mustache is the most powerful configuration of facial hair the world has ever known. It overpowers whoever touches it. By merely doodling a Toothbrush mustache on a poster, you make a political statement. — Rich Cohen

One night I walked out of the church when the priest said that we should never have fought the Revolutionary war and every war was bad. It was 4th of July. It was an outrageously political statement. I just never felt right when people in the church would take these overtly political positions especially when I felt like I was a good Christian, I was serving my country, and I just didn't feel like I deserved to be lambasted by the priest on the 4th of July. — Wesley Clark

I didn't want to do an electro-class album or complex rap album. I wanted to do something that was kind of like a political statement, but also club jams. I wanted it to be dancy, but intelligent at the same time. — Le1f

I will never say, 'support the troops.' I don't believe in the validity of that statement. People say, 'I don't support the war, I support the troops' as though you can actually separate the two. You cannot; the troops are a part of the war, they have become the war and there is no valid dissection of the two. Other people shout with glaring eyes that we should give up our politics, give up our political affiliations in favor of 'just supporting the troops.' I wish everything were that easy. — Thomas Naughton

I feel so Scottish when I go abroad, and I'm so proud of it, but for me, it's not a political statement - I just happen to be Scottish. — Michelle Gomez

I don't know that I will ever make a political speech again." Would he care to qualify that statement? one reporter queried. "Yes," Roosevelt laughingly said. "I won't say never. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Did you really say y'all to me? Did i actually make a political statement to which your non sequitur reply was, 'Are y'all vegetarians? — Blanche McCrary Boyd

When you put gas in your car you are making a political statement, because you are supporting the empires that control and continue the destruction of some countries. — Javier Bardem

It's pretty standard fare in political discourse. You misconstrue what somebody said. You isolate a statement, you lend your interpretation to it and then feign moral outrage. And Democrats have been doing it for years. — John F. Kerry

You can't say 'I don't do politics,' because silence is a political statement. — Tariq Ramadan

Coming at us like this--in waves, massed and unbreachable--knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment--becomes bad knowledge--so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness... "Ignorance." In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence... If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance... Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. — Ruth Ozeki

Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect."
"Yes, it is. But it is politically correct."
(The Rise of Political Correctness) — Angelo Codevilla

With Storytelling, at least, it's explicit: this is what the censors say American citizens, no matter what age, are not permitted to see, even though it can be seen by other people all over the world. I suppose you could call it a political statement. — Todd Solondz

The instructions did not require explicit statement. They followed logically from theory, which was, as I remember it, as follows: Because people need protection, they must align themselves with a political organization. The Democratic Party was entitled to our loyalty because it represented the social and economic interests of the working class, of which our family, relatives, and neighbors were members (except for one uncle who, though a truck driver, consistently voted Republican and was therefore thought to be either stupid or crazy). The Republican Party represented the interests of the rich, who, by definition, had no concern for us. The — Neil Postman

I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it. — Arundhati Roy

Love is a human experience, not a political statement. — Anne Hathaway

It doesnt hurt to repeat here the statement, still rejected by many people in spite of its obviousness, that education is a political act. — Paulo Freire

In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, "people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together". To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a militar unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society. — Robert A. Nisbet

the hackers realizes which one is which. As a political statement, the hacker changes the amount of fluoride flowing into the drinking water. He plans to do this for only a few minutes. Almost immediately, lightning strikes a phone pedestal a mile down the road. The DSL line the hacker is using "goes dark". Panic finds its way across the hacker's face as he realizes he just murdered over a thousand people with fluoride poisoning. — Jeremy Martin

I'm somewhat of a raptivist but I wasn't attempting to make a socio-political statement as much as I was attempting to voice for the voiceless whatever ideas that came to mind if I was in that situation. — Myka 9

This trial is a farce. The real prosecutor is not the state of Finland, but the government of one great power. The real defendants are not the persons who were picked on political grounds and now stand accused here. The real defendant is the Finnish people. The purpose of this trial is not to mete out maximum sentences on those accused, but for a Finnish court to declare that Finland was the aggressor in the war and that the Soviet Union was a peace-loving, wronged victim of an unjustified aggression. [Final statement during Soviet dictated "War-responsibility" mock trial, 1945] — Risto Ryti

I haven't made a political statement in quite a long time because, frankly, they get repeated, changed. — Tom Selleck

Certainly, the murder of civilians for political statement did not just begin on September 11, 2001. — Cliff Stearns

I already feel that I am making a political statement by sticking around in music, when I am doing it so differently to everyone else. — M.I.A.

Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can't totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral. — Linus Torvalds

We're all living blinkered lives, and we're not seeing what's going on and looking to change it. I'm not saying that everyone has to make a political statement, but we need to be more aware of what's happening and why. — Samantha Morton

Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm. — Ruth Ozeki

My choosing Islam was not a political statement; it was a spiritual statement. — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

(This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization's ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren't, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it's no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It's no consolation that some time later someone will realize that an organization was needed to carry out the original organization's task, so a replacement is created: you still lost your job and the task went undone. The only sure way forward is to build an agency that looks to its own survival before it looks to its mission statement. Just another example of evolution in action.) — Charles Stross

It's not what my job is about. I'm not out to make a political statement. I want to stand for something, but more by example. — Lauren Bush

Making art in America is sort of a political statement in and of itself. It's not the best environment for that sometimes. — Steve Earle

That statement was not addressed to the authors of political statements. I said that I deplore attempts to misinform the public and to /trigger/ political intervention. And there were such attempts. — Mario Monti

The assertion that there are an infinite number of homosexualities is a political statement rather than an observable fact. — Rictor Norton

Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly. — Eric Drooker

I'm of the opinion that if you step on stage and you're not a straight white male, you're automatically making a political statement whether you know it or not. — W. Kamau Bell

If today I have to make a political statement, it is, 'I love beauty.' I think beauty makes people better. — Marjane Satrapi

Killing in the name of religion defines someone who is ignorant and actually void of religion. God does not condone terror. To kill innocent people to make a political statement is like shooting a dove to say hunting is wrong. — Suzy Kassem

My hair is an aesthetic choice ... At the same time, how you wear your hair is a political statement as well. — Erykah Badu

There is, however, something odd about this pattern. Other than joining a political party, it is hard to think of any other sort of community that people join by agreeing to a set of principles. Imagine joining a knitting group. Does anyone go to a knitting group and ask if the knitters believe in knitting or what they hold to be true about knitting? Do people ask for a knitting doctrinal statement? Indeed, if you start knitting by reading a book about knitting or a history of knitting or a theory of knitting, you will very likely never knit. — Diana Butler Bass

Without world unification the species would destroy itself by the enlarged powers that had come to it. This, said the men of science, is no theory, no political alternative; it is a statement of fact. Men had to pool their political, economic and educational lives. There was no other way for them but a series of degenerative phases leading very plainly to extinction. They could not revert now. They had to go on - up or down. They had gone too far with civilisation and in societies, to sink back into a merely "animal" life again. The hold of the primates on life had always been a precarious one. Except where they were under human protection all the other great apes were extinct. Now plainly man had to go on to a larger life, a planetary existence, or perish in his turn. — H.G.Wells

Approaching any movie with a three in the title you know you are not going to get a political polemic. You are not going to get some sort of political statement or ultra-deep message. — J.J. Abrams

I dance as a political statement, because disabled bodies are inherently political, but I mostly dance for all the same reasons anyone else does: because it heals my spirit and fills me with joy. — Stella Young

He could feel all of it so clearly it was as if it were happening right then. But more than that, he felt sorrow. Someone had just tried to do the same thing to his baby girl. Had tried to kill her, not because he hated her, but because she was standing in the path of his political statement. Everyone who died on that shuttle had been a Felcia to someone. And with the click of a button he'd killed them. He — James S.A. Corey

I never start anything with a really overt, political, or even exactly artistic mission statement. — Lena Dunham

I hope that just what I sing about and how I relate to my audience is as much of a political statement as I need to make. — Dave Matthews

There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions. At other times, no act
no campaign or tract, statement or rampage
has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics. At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and a frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. "There's one," it said. That was in the 1960's. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what? — Renata Adler

A fart is not only a political statement; it is also a weapon. — Bridget Christie

The ultimate aim of politics is not politics, but the activities which can be practised within the political framework of the State. Therefore an effective statement of these activities e.g. science , art , religion is in itself a declaration of ultimate aims around which the political means will crystallise ... a society with no values outside of politics is a machine carrying its human cargo, with no purpose in its institutions reflecting their care, eternal aspirations, loneliness, need for love . — Stephen Spender

Breastroke is an athletic event, butterfly is a political statement. — Paul Tsongas

Any contemporary political re-statement of liberal and socialist goals must include as central the idea of a society in which all men would become men of substantive reason, whose independent reasoning would have structural consequences for their societies, its history and thus for their own life fates. — C. Wright Mills

The most important form of incremental change is the decision by the individual to become vegan. Veganism, or the eschewing of all animal products, is more than a matter of diet or lifestyle; it is a political and moral statement in which the individual accepts the principle of abolition in her own life. Veganism is the one truly abolitionist goal that we can all achieve-and we can achieve it immediately, starting with our next meal. — Gary L. Francione

Whether it's people walking off 'The View' when Bill O'Reilly makes a statement about radical Islam or Juan Williams being fired for expressing his opinion, over-reaching political correctness is chipping away at the fundamental American freedoms of speech and expression. — Eric Cantor

The depiction of women by women (sometimes themselves) as a political statement grows potentially more powerful as it approaches actual exploitation but then, within an ace of it, collapses into ambiguity and confusion. The more attractive the women, the higher the risk, since the more closely they approach conventional stereotypes in the first place. — J. Ann Tickner

I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church. — Margaret George

You can see the proof in an MRI scan of someone presented with political opinions that conflict with her own. The brain scans of a person shown statements that oppose her political stance show that the highest areas of the cortex, the portions responsible for providing rational thought, get less blood until another statement is presented that confirms her beliefs. Your brain literally begins to shut down when you feel your ideology is threatened. Try it yourself. Watch a pundit you hate for fifteen minutes. Resist the urge to change the channel. Don't complain to the person next to you. Don't get online and rant. Try to let it go. You will find this is excruciatingly difficult. — David McRaney

Immediately after his re-election [Cameron] announced: "For too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens so long as you obey the law we will leave you alone." A statement so far to the right that it conceded the political centre ground to Judge Dredd. — Frankie Boyle

What changed at the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, was not so much the discovery of a fundamentally new concept in human relations but the emergence of a political movement universalizing what until then had been largely a local and territorial impulse. This insight helps to explain the speed of change. What is notable for our purposes is the dualistic or two-sided character of the free-air principle. On the one hand, it reflected views about what was proper in human relationships, a sense of the wrongness of enslavement. But on the other hand, it had an exclusivist side, a statement of pride in national identity, coupled with a determination to prevent established relationships from being disrupted by the — Gavin Wright

I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me, in China and in America; my refusal to be defined by the will of others is my one and only political statement. — Yiyun Li

Being cast out of society early on made you see civilization for the farce it was, a theater of cruelty you were free to drop out of. Instead of playing along you became a fuckup. It was a political statement and a survival skill. — Michelle Tea

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing. — Mohsin Hamid

Smith and Carlos aside, I object to using the Olympic awards stand to make a political statement. — Brent Musburger

And realising that humour is the most powerful way to make a political statement and say the things that you want to say. And it's not used enough, at least not in the U.S. — Michael Moore

I may go back and spice it up with a little bit of the tool stuff and grunting and all that that I know so well. But it feels like I'm rehashing old material. And some of my audiences like that. So I'm there to entertain. I'm not there to make a political statement or anything like that. I'm there to entertain. — Tim Allen

Thus, it's important to keep in mind that you should never go vagabonding out of a vague sense of fashion or obligation. Vagabonding is not a social gesture, nor is it a moral high ground. It's not a seamless twelve-step program of travel correctness or a political statement that demands the reinvention of society. Rather, it's a personal act that demands only the realignment of self. If this personal realignment is not something you're willing to confront (or, of course, if world travel isn't your idea of a good time), you have the perfect right to leave vagabonding to those who feel the calling. — Rolf Potts

If you ask a conservative for a statement of his political convictions, he may well say that he has none, and that the greatest heresy of modernity is precisely to see politics as a matter of convictions as though one could recuperate, at the level of political purpose, the consoling certainty which once was granted by religious faith. In another sense, however, conservatism does rest in a system of belief, and is opposed as much to the theory as to the practice of socialist and liberal politics. — Roger Scruton

Rock n' roll is not just a fashion statement; it is the attitude, and it has a political posturing as well. — CeeLo Green

The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is ... political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act. — Amiri Baraka

When was the last time you heard an insightful, inspiring piece of oratory from an Australian political leader, an appeal to what is pure and true within humanity: a statement of belief backed by ideas for change betterment, a call to those immutable values wherein lie the potential greatness of people individually and collectively? Such exhortation, such leadership is lamentably scarce. — Michael Short

I've never thought of the Olympics as a political statement. I really think a boycott ... is in the wrong as far as the athletes are concerned. — Johnny Weir

All necessary measures should be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale. - joint statement signed by both Chaim Weizmann and Prince Faisal — Sol Stern

The idea wasn't to make a direct political statement since the current economic collapse hadn't begun when we started on the book. The parallels I'm most interested in are the ways that human nature never changes, no matter how far back in time you look. — James Vance

People keep framing this as a religious freedom issue, but there's a difference between practicing your religion - which everyone has the right to do - and rubbing your religion in people's faces as a triumphalist political statement, which is what's happening here. — Pat Condell

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement. — Irvine Welsh

Caricatures are an important part of our culture of debate. They should defuse political spats through humor and irony. It is about making a strong statement but softening it with a wink. So Danes do not get too upset about caricatures. None of us is interested in insulting Muslims. — Anders Fogh Rasmussen