#tate

You look at the pillars of the state: politics, the media, police, lawyers - they've all got their formal role, and then nestling above that is that power elite who are networked in through soft, social links, that are actually running the show. Why didn't I know that 10 years ago, and why didn't I rail against it? Why did I become part of it? ↗

— Tom A. Watson

#actually #against #ago #become #did

Recently, my personal advisors have been telling me to go to America. Actually, people have been walking up to me in the street and telling me to sod off, but that's the same thing, isn't it? ↗

— Alexei Sayle

#deranged #different #drapes #elevator #git

If the Bahreini royal family can have an embassy, a state, and a seat at the UN, why should the twenty-five million Kurds not have a claim to autonomy? The alleviation of their suffering and the assertion of their self-government is one of the few unarguable benefits of regime change in Iraq. It is not a position from which any moral retreat would be allowable. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#autonomy #bahrain #iraq #iraq-war #kurdish-people

The necessity of every one paying in his own labor for what he consumes, affords the only legitimate and effectual check to excessive luxury, which has so often ruined individuals, states and empires; and which has now brought almost universal bankruptcy upon us. ↗

— Josiah Warren

#almost #bankruptcy #brought #check #consumes

So the proposition that the ideal parents for any child are its biological parents is a statement with which we can all agree in the generality, but which does not apply, for one reason or another, in many particular circumstances. ↗

— Malcolm Turnbull

#another #any #apply #biological #child

The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; it is this. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#going #great #idea #instead #just

The Constitution shall never be construed... to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms. ↗

— Samuel Adams

#citizens #constitution #construed #keeping #never

Every scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it. ↗

— Louis Agassiz

#been #before #believed #bible #conflicts

Under democracy one party always devotes it's chief energies to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-- and both commonly succeed, and are right. the United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent.It's history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#politics-of-the-united-states #intelligence

I rise today to offer a formal and heartfelt apology to all the victims of lynching in our history, and for the failure of the United States Senate to take action when action was most needed. ↗

— George Allen

#apology #failure #formal #heartfelt #history