Us Politics Quotes

“In the history of American democracy, we have had undisciplined presidents. We have had inexperienced presidents. We have had amoral presidents. Rarely if ever before have we had them all at once.”
― Anonymous, A Warning

“NO DIVINE BOVINE ! The clumsy creature currently inhabiting the White House is a distinctly dangerous animal. Part boneheaded raging bully, part dastardly coward showing signs of advanced stage mad cow disease. Neither of good pedigree nor useful breeding stock, there is essentially very little of substance between the T (bone) and the RUMP, except of course for an abundance of methane and bullshit. It's high time brave matadors for you to enter the bullring, with nimble step and fleet of foot. Take good aim and bring down this marauding beast once and for all. Slay public enemy number one and we will salute you forever. A louder cheer you will not hear from Madrid to Mexico City, from Beijing to Brussels, from London to Lahore, from Toronto to Tehran and ten thousand cities in between.”
― Alex Morritt, Impromptu Scribe

“We should drop the bizarre American fiction that corporations are people, enjoying all the rights of citizens, including unfettered campaign donations as a form of free speech. Indeed, corporations possess greater rights than do people, as they cannot be jailed or executed, while citizens can and do suffer those fates. As the legal historian Zephyr Teachout has observed, the founders would have considered corporate campaign spending the essence of political corruption.”
― Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

“The term '20/20 vision' implies good if not perfect sight. May the advent of 2020 - a new year, a new decade - see a lifting of the fog which has recently blurred the edges of what can be described as 'acceptable political discourse', and in the process refocus voter attention on the clear need to demand from elected representatives, a display of basic decency and decorum in public life - both of which have been seriously lacking in the behaviour of some high profile politicians on both sides of the pond, on an eye-watering number of occasions. That indeed would be a sight for sore eyes.”
― Alex Morritt, Impromptu Scribe

“What is the endgame of all these megaconstructions? Well, in ancient Egypt, the late 6th-dynasty state had not only become so large that it was nonfunctional (think of the giant cable company that never answers the phone), it had also become a mass of intercompeting elites who used the government to serve no one but themselves. (Think of today´s relentless multimillion-dollar bonuses, payoffs, bribes, insider trading, and fraud, all happening openly with no one going to prison.) As the competition ramped up, and as the Egyptian state became impoverished from mismanagement, the end result was nothing less than war.”
― Kara Cooney, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World

“In the U.S. election of 1860, the New York Herald's owner James Gordon Bennett Sr. warned the white workers of New York, "... if Lincoln is elected, you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“Patience and follow-through aren't typical American virtues. You like to make a mess and move on to the next problem. - Gabriel Allon”
― Daniel Silva, The Messenger

“Mitch McConnell is a psychopath. He's a classic psychopath but he does it much more subtly than Trump does.”
― Justin A. Frank

“...Ironically, three decades later President Barack Obama introduced a universal health insurance bill modeled closely after the Carter bill. Mondale´s former aide Richard Moe wrote that Obamacare ¨bore a striking resemblance to Carter´s proposal three decades before."The legislation pass Congress in 2009 with the support of Senator Kennedy, by then diagnosed with fatal brain cancer. In retrospect, Kennedy´s refusal to support Carter´s incremental, catastrophic national health insurance bill in 1978-79 condemned the country to wait three decades for meaningful healthcare reform. By any measure, this was a tragedy for the country. ¨The miss opportunity,¨ Eizenstat later wrote, ¨haunts me to this day.”
― Kai Bird, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

“...Populism tends to look good from a distance, but close up it can be frightening.”
― Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

“We've been called radicals, terrorists. We've been dismissed as an impossible fringe movement. But now we are a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational, multi-faith mass movement united in demanding change, in demanding accountability, in demanding that our police, our government, our country recognize that Black lives do indeed matter.

(From election victory speech)”
― Cori Bush

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler”
― J.D. Vance

“I like Sanders a lot...but I think his time may have passed.”
― Robert Kuttner

“These were the fetishes that gathered the tribe of white supremacy, that rallied them to the age-old banner, and if there was one mistake, one reason why I did not see the coming tragedy, why I did not account for its possibilities, it was because I had not yet truly considered that banner's fearsome power.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“All I'm doing is I'm saying what AOC said when she was running for office... and people are going nuts about it.”
― Jimmy Dore

“Do you realize the greed that came to the forefront? The hogs were really feeding. The greed level, the level of opportunism, just got out of control... The power of [big business and the rich] turned out to be stronger than I realized. [They] know how to make themselves heard. The problem is, unorganized groups can't play in this game.”
― David Stockman

“As it stands, the United States is facing a crisis of identity unlike any before. The country is headed toward an inversion of its demographics, with its powerful white majority expected to be out-numbered by people not of European descent within two decades. This is unknown territory for everyone in the hierarchy, an ethnic distribution that could potentially look closer to that of South Africa than to what Americans have grown accustomed to.

Anticipatory fear seems already to have surfaced, but if history is any guide, a change in demographics might have less of a material effect on the dominant caste than imagined. A 2016 study found that, if disparities in wealth continue at the current pace, it would take black families 228 years to amass the wealth that white families have now, and Latino families another 84 years to reach parity.

Thus, as in South Africa, there would be no reason to believe that economic, social, and, in America, political dominance would not still remain in the hands of those who have held it for the entirety of the country's history.

This will be a test of the cherished ideal of majority rule, the moral framework for caste dominance in America since its founding.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“After it was all over, the Carter people were stunned by Kennedy´s conduct. Why? Why would the Kennedy crowd persist in defeat, knowing that their displays of rancor would only further weaken a Democratic president in the face of the Reagan challenge from the right? Well, Kennedy partisans hated to see all the romantic notion of the Kennedy mystique coming to an end. Camelot was dying, and most ignobly, at the hands of these crude Georgia boys. And on the other side of the equation, the Georgia boys could not fathom the animosity. They felt their man was not only a liberal and a populist but a politician of integrity and intelligence who had accomplished much in his few years in the White House. For the Georgians, Kennedy´s behavior at the convention was all about ego. As Jody Powell later said, ¨We neglected to take into account one of the obvious facets of Kennedy´s character, an almost childlike self-centeredness.¨”
― Kai Bird, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

“We are motivated by radical love of country.
We fight for universal healthcare because of love.
We fight for a livable planet because of love.
We fight for equitable housing because of love.

(7/31/2020 on Twitter)”
― Ilhan Omar

“Aggressive, overreaching wealth redistribution *does* happen in the United States, it just happens in the opposite direction conservatives scream about: our system takes money away from everyday people and siphons it towards the profanely wealthy.

(9/16/2020 on Twitter)”
― Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“We are not a center-right country. We are a fairly progressive country on a range of issues with antebellum institutions.

(11/6/2020 on Twitter)”
― Waleed Shahid

“Q: Do you like mainstream political cartoons?

A: Besides Tom Toles and Kirk Anderson, no.”
― Clay Butler

“Anyone who thinks there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans is a dingdong, Lots of people generalize that they're the same because they both pander to corporate interests. It's true: we live in a plutocracy condoned by a totally ignorant public...I'm not saying Democrats are perfect, but I think there are a lot of good, well-meaning people trapped in the system

(2002 interview in Attitude)”
― Jen Sorensen

“This idea that voting is the full extent of our power is actually disempowering in my view, because what it tells people is that their only time, their only avenue for participating in politics is when they vote.”
― Bree Newsome Bass

“for those who thought I was the best candidate but chose to work for someone else because they viewed my campaign as hopeless, they will need to reexamine their thinking for truly, no woman will ever achieve the presidency as long as their potential supporters hold this view.

(From Voices of Multicultural America)”
― Shirley Chisholm

“Ideology is no excuse for not focusing on working for and with the people who pay you to represent them, despite their politics — people who you are supposed to be fighting for.”
― Tyrus, Just Tyrus

“To me, a very basic political principle is that you cannot take on the establishment when you take their money.”
― Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In

“We finally beat Medicare.”
― Joe Biden

“IT'S JOEVER”
― Anonymous

“Texas representative Louie Gohmert declared in a December 2017 floor speech, 'The Supreme Court looked at all of the evidence and declared in an opinion that the United States was founded as, and is, a Christian nation.' He added to this gross misstatement by insisting that 'the only way any people can truly have freedom of religion is if they have a constitution that is founded on Judeo-Christian principles.' The opposite is true.”
― Andrew L. Seidel, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American