If we attribute too much power and potential to the media in the power struggle between the branches, we will be falling prey to mistaking the media for the message. And if we fall prey to that mistake, the inevitable result will be a tendency to shape the message, in this case the legislative process, to fit the media.
Author: John B. Anderson | Subjects: News | Media | Publishing, Politics & Public Policy
How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if he had taken a poll in the land of Israel? What would have happened to the Reformation if Martin Luther had taken a poll? It isn’t polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It’s right and wrong and leadership.
Author: Harry S. Truman | Subjects: Leadership, Politics & Public Policy
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
Author: Plato | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
We misunderstand Congress’s role if we demand that it be a model of efficiency and quick action. America’s founders never intended it to be that. They clearly understood that one of the key roles of Congress is to slow down the process—to allow tempers to cool and to encourage careful deliberation, so that unwise or damaging laws do not pass in the heat of the … [ Read more ]
Author: Lee H. Hamilton | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
How can knowledgeable, reasonable, pragmatic men work for their own servitude, thinking they’re struggling for their freedom? That is what is called ideology.
Author: Bernard-Henri Lévy | Subjects: Freedom | Liberty, Perception | Observation, Politics & Public Policy
He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me […] Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Author: Thomas Jefferson | Subjects: Law | Legal, Politics & Public Policy
A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children.
Author: John James Audubon | Subjects: Environment | Sustainability, Politics & Public Policy
Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they’re condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It’s a cruel, repetitious bore.
Author: Tom Robbins | Subjects: Philosophy, Politics & Public Policy
The most dynamic economic and political institutions right now are those that have abandoned the goal of redistributing wealth, in favor of increasing wealth for the total society.
I’ll give you three examples. One is the shift from a conscripted army to an all-volunteer force. A draft is based on the notion of equality; everyone serves. To be sure, there are draft dodgers and deferments; but … [ Read more ]
Author: Philip Bobbitt | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
There are several simultaneous and related events already on the horizon that indicate the severe stresses to the nation-state in fulfilling its promises to steadily improve the material well-being of the nation.
First, nation-states are trying to protect their national cultures against the Internet, against international communications media, and against electronic links that can’t really be barricaded out.
Second, they are trying to protect their national currencies … [ Read more ]
Author: Philip Bobbitt | Subjects: International, Politics & Public Policy
So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.
Author: Elbert Hubbard | Subjects: Culture, Politics & Public Policy
You’re not going to solve the problem of poverty by redistributing the wealth you have; that’s ridiculous. The only way you can solve the problem of poverty is by creating more and more wealth.
Author: N. R. Narayana Murthy | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Politics & Public Policy
Man’s capacity for evil makes democracy necessary and man’s capacity for good makes democracy possible.
Author: Reinhold Niebuhr | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Politics & Public Policy
Our driving addiction, combined with single-use zoning, which separates homes from public spaces and services that are crucial to real neighborhoods, has created the barren “bedroom community,” designed not around human needs but around three-car garages, wide streets, and highway access to shopping malls.
Author: James Kunstler | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Over there [communist Eastern Europe] nothing goes and everything matters; over here everything goes and nothing matters. When everything is free and nothing is at risk, when all is blandly equal, who cares?
Author: Philip Roth | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Politics & Public Policy
Our greatest weakness is the habit of reducing the most complex issues to the most simplistic moralisms. About Communism. About Capitalism. About Crime. About Corruption […] It has made it difficult for Americans to think honestly and to some purpose about themselves and their problems. Moralism drives our thought.
[…]
We have acquired bad habits of speech and worse patterns of behavior, lurching from crisis to crisis … [ Read more ]
Author: Daniel Patrick Moynihan | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
The war on drugs is one of the worst policies America has ever produced. It has put two million black men in jail—the worst incarceration of blacks in human history. California is spending more on new prisons than higher education, and it’s all being driven by the war on drugs. We’ve got the whole thing dead wrong. It hasn’t worked; it isn’t working; it will … [ Read more ]
Author: Peter Schwartz | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
Author: Abbie Hoffman | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
In making giants of the Founders, we make pygmies of ourselves; in making saints of them, we make sinners of ourselves. Sinners we may be, but no more so than they. And although humility is a virtue, when consciousness of our sins becomes an inferiority complex that causes large numbers of the present generation to turn away from politics as incomparably inept or corrupt, it … [ Read more ]
Author: H. W. Brands | Subjects: History, Politics & Public Policy
The United States Army says, “Our soldiers are our credentials.” As a society, can we say, “Our children are our credentials?”
Author: Frances Hesselbein | Subjects: Culture, Politics & Public Policy