#pol

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues.... ↗

— George Orwell

#politics #age

There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#conservatism #economics #intellectuals #keynesianism #law

One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. ↗

— Marshall Sahlins

#culture #evolution #hunger #hunters #starvation

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing. ↗

— Neil Postman

#elections #irrelevance #media #nate-silver #news

The race will find that capitalists and communists modify themselves so much during the ages that they end by being indistinguishable as democrats... ↗

— T.H. White

#communism #democrats #humor #politics #age

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#genocide #ideology #politics #society #terrorism

But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple. ↗

— John Kenneth Galbraith

#politics #age

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#leadership #politics #zeitgeist #age

The possibility of somebody emerging as a nuclear power or events happening that surprise us on the nuclear age is still a possibility. It always will be because there's an awful lot going on behind the scenes. Our intelligence just has to get better on that score. Peter Goss ↗

— Joel C. Rosenberg

#politics #age

The fate of the Right in the late modern age is to destroy what remains of the past in a vain attempt to recover it. ↗

— John Gray

#politics #right #age