225 Quotations Found

Constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such … [ Read more ]

Author: Hannah Arendt | Subjects: Communication, Concepts, Good & Evil, Politics & Public Policy

A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities.

Authors: Jay Van Bavel, Philip Pärnamets | Source: Scientific American | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

As Aristotle observed all those many years ago, tyranny is all about arbitrariness. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. There is only the whim of the tyrant. There is only his inordinate desire to have more than his fair share of everything. Under political tyranny external laws become arbitrary… Under cultural tyranny internal values become … [ Read more ]

Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

The liberal democracy is an artificial environment, carefully crafted to both contain human nature and convert it into an engine of progress. When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is. It’s easy to forget that we’re living in a rare anomaly within human … [ Read more ]

Author: Tim Urban | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon. But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.” In the … [ Read more ]

Author: Jimmy Carter | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Change, Communication, Concepts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Another way of thinking about the class/partisan divide … is between people whose business is the production and distribution of words — academics, journalists, civil servants, lawyers, intellectuals — and people whose business is the production and distribution of things — manufacturers, drivers, contractors, distributors, and so on. The first group makes the rules for the administrative state. The latter lives under the weight of … [ Read more ]

Author: Bret Stephens | Source: The New York Times | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

By the early 2000s, I came to believe that the free market policies that were right to combat stagnation and sclerosis a few decades earlier were not right for an age of inequality and social breakdown. Then the congressional Republicans began to oppose almost every positive federal good, even George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Trump brought the three horsemen of the apocalypse — immorality, dishonesty … [ Read more ]

Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.

Author: Peter Wehner | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Politics & Public Policy, Religion

If you look at the actual budget breakdown, it tends to be that 1 percent is allocated to preventative health. I think that’s a bit of an underestimate because, you know, for things like cancer screening, et cetera, that would also count as preventative. But it’s still a small minority and a lot less than it needs to be.

This is the great pivot that needs … [ Read more ]

Author: Andrew Scott | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the … [ Read more ]

Author: Theodore Roosevelt | Subjects: America, International, Politics & Public Policy

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. […] May we not even say, that that form of government is the best, which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?

Author: Thomas Jefferson | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

A good cause is often injured more by ill timed efforts of its friends than by the arguments of its enemies.

Author: Thomas Jefferson | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Liberty and equality can be very much at odds with each other. […] Generally, so-called liberals pursue equality more zealously, whereas conservatives care first for liberty.

Author: Eva Brann | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Author: Unknown | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s … [ Read more ]

Author: Ezra Klein | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, International, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding.

Author: Louis Brandeis | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

You live in a democracy — this halfway house between nightmare and utopia — which throws fewer obstacles in the way of an individual than its alternatives.

Author: Joseph Brodsky | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

Identity politics divides us. Fiction connects. One is interested in sweeping generalizations. The other, in nuances. One draws boundaries. The other recognizes no frontiers. Identity politics is made of solid bricks. Fiction is flowing water.

Author: Elif Shafak | Source: TED | Subjects: Literature | Arts, Politics & Public Policy

The ideologue looks at life and says, “what’s right works”; the pragmatist looks at life and says, “what works is right.”

Author: Mark Shields | Source: PBS NewsHour | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

Author: Daniel Patrick Moynihan | Subject: Politics & Public Policy