[oppose_obama]

I could refer you to other great minds who have opined on the subject. I believe Dave chappelle said if women were attracted to men who live in card board boxes, then men would live in card board boxes

Listen rape is the least amount of work but society frowns upon that attitude.

Money and power is a good enough goal in itself though

[CAVU]

Considering I'm a non interventionist this quote against the Iraq War from that Vietnam veteran that joined congress always stuck to me. I think JOHN MURTHA was his name

I go by Arlington cemetery every day. And the Vice President – he criticizes Democrats? Let me tell you, those gravestones don’t say
Democrat or Republican. They say American!

[Tezelian_Imperialist]

Democracy is not the right choice but the popular choices.

[Arkady2009]

The one quote that I have lived by for years, and that I feel has a lot of truth in it, comes from my fave movie Terminator 2. I know you wanted political quotes though, but this is the one I live by: 'The futures not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves'.

Never a day goes by when this quote isn't relevant.

[GandalfTheGrey]

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Gandalf the Grey (J R R Tolkein)

[Godstud]

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. - Mahatma Ghandi
My girlfriend/fiancee practically lives by this, so I have a new respect for it. I endorse it.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. - Buddha
Also a good quote.

[Fried Chicken]

The one quote that I have lived by for years, and that I feel has a lot of truth in it, comes from my fave movie Terminator 2. I know you wanted political quotes though, but this is the one I live by: 'The futures not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves'.

Never a day goes by when this quote isn't relevant.

I bet you wouldn't say that if your dog ate your winning lottery ticket.

[Andropov]

Я против постановки памятников. Не хочу видеть на улицах наспех сработанные, неумело отесанные и отлитые фигуры в шинели, фуражке, с усами, да еще и с трубкой в зубах. Еще не родился художник, способный изваять памятник величайшему, мистическому деятелю минувшего века. Памятник Сталину существует - оборона Сталинграда с громадным, в пол-мира заревом. Дымящиеся руины Берлина с алым трепещущим флагом. Бессчетные заводы и домны, покрывшие страну от Бреста до Владивостока. Университеты и Академии, в которых расцветали науки. Космические корабли и атомные станции, каких не видел мир. Памятник Сталину - это великая "красная цивилизация", подобной которой не знало человечество во времена фараонов, эллинизма, древнего и нового времени.


Прав тот, кто говорит: Сталин - это не только парады сорок первого и сорок пятого годов. Не только восстановление разоренной страны и рывок в грядущее. Это - ГУЛАГ, расстрелы, бесчисленные тюремные вагоны в Сибирь, обездоленное крестьянство, подневольный труд на каналах. Все это входит в памятник грозному времени, беспощадному сверхчеловеку, согнувшему ось земли.

I am against the building of monuments. I do not wish to see on our streets hastily made and poorly molded sculptures with overcoats, caps, with mustaches and pipes. There has not yet been an artist born capable of creating a monument to the most epic and mystical figures of the past age. Monuments to Stalin exist - the defense of Stalingrad, with a howl heard across the world. The smoldering ruins of Berlin with its solemn, fluttering red flag. Countless factories and homes, covering the nation from Brest to Vladivostok. Universities and Academies, in which flowered science. Cosmic ships and atomic plants, the likes of which the world has never seen.

He is right who says: Stalin - is not just the parades of 1941 and 1945. Not just the restoration of the country and the surge forward. It is - the GULAG, executions, countless prison wagons to Siberia, a crushed peasantry, and forced labor on the canals. All of this is the monument to a fearsome era, a ruthless super-human, who bent the earth and the world to his will.

[Joe Liberty]

Pretty much any quote from Thomas Jefferson, but this is one of my favorites: "to compel a man to pay for the propagation of ideas he finds abhorrent is sinful and tyrannical."

Also, Samuel Adams: "If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

[Rancid]

"You can't solve major problems with just potatoes" - Douglas Adams.

[EastCoastAmerican]

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

~Martin Luther King Jr.


“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

~John F. Kennedy

[quetzalcoatl]

Paracelsus, on the meaning of man's existence:

"Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal. Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow. When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven, as it were and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him. For such is the immensity of man that he is greater than heaven and earth. He who is born in imagination discovers the latent forces of Nature. . . . Besides the stars that are established, there is yet another -- Imagination -- that begets a new star and a new heaven."

[IQless1]

"That depends on what the meaning of 'is', is." Bill Clinton - The definition of a politician.

Most of my favorites, politically, must be from that Sage of Linguists, Bush, Jr. though. A few of his brighter moments:

"They misunderestimated me." The typical cunning misuse of words. All deliberatically, of course.

"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." Steady now. You don't want to say something people may take the wrong way.

"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test." Brilliant use of words to inspire the children...to not wind up like you.

"I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here." Bedazzling the crowd.

"Amigo! Amigo!" ...to the Prime Minister of Italy...oy!

"I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best."

"I guess it's OK to call the secretary of education here 'buddy.' That means friend."

"People say, well, do you ever hear any other voices other than, like, a few people? Of course I do." Some are even in his head!

"I've been in the Bible every day since I've been the president." Insert terrifying music....now.

"Yesterday, you made note of my -- the lack of my talent when it came to dancing. But nevertheless, I want you to know I danced with joy. And no question Liberia has gone through very difficult times." Indeed, Mr. President. Indeed.

"There's no question about it. Wall Street got drunk -- that's one of the reasons I asked you to turn off the TV cameras -- it got drunk and now it's got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments." Elegance. Pure elegance.

"And so the fact that they purchased the machine meant somebody had to make the machine. And when somebody makes a machine, it means there's jobs at the machine-making place." You mean the 'factory'? Was that so hard to remember?

"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." I imagine they turned the cameras off after a time...out of respect for the disabled.

"Removing Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency, it is the right decision now, and it will be the right decision ever." You tell 'em!

"All I can tell you is when the governor calls, I answer his phone." Could it be? Is he Benson? He looks different now.

Ok, I'm probably pushing my luck posting these. I simply couldn't help myself.

***with apologies to the OPer if these are unsuitable here***

[IQless1]

In the spirit of the OP:

"Human kind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect." Chief Seattle, Duwamish (1780-1866)

...and Al Gore said he invented the internet...

[Rainbow Crow]

This strikes me as a great thread for Gorkiy...

Why does the snow fall?
People grow cold without an answer.
But does the snow know it chills the hearts of men?

[Rei Murasame]

The opening post contains a lot of posts that I agree with wholeheartedly, so I need not quote those that have been already been said by FRS. I think I'll go with:

Liberal freedom thus supposes that individuals can be abstracted from their origins, their environment, the context in which they live and where they exercise their choices, from everything, that is., that makes them who they are, and not someone else. It supposes, in other words, as John Rawls says, that the individual is always prior to his ends. Nothing, however, proves that the individual can apprehend himself as a subject free of any allegiance, free of any determinism. Moreover, nothing proves that in all circumstances he will prefer freedom over every other good. Such a conception by definition ignores commitments and attachment that owe nothing to rational calculation. It is a purely formal conception, that makes it impossible to understand what a real person is.

Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership in a spiritual society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing but mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a system of government is also, and above all, a system of thought.

The Party! What is the meaning of a Party if they don't follow their Leaders?

It often strikes a man to inquire what is the chief good in life; to one the thought comes that it is a happy marriage, to another great wealth, and as each seizes on his idea, for that he more or less works for the rest of his existence. To myself thinking over the same question the wish came to render myself useful to my country. [...]

Take one more case of the younger son with high thoughts, high aspirations, endowed by nature with all the faculties to make a great man, and with the sole wish in life to serve his Country but he lacks two things the means and the opportunity, ever troubled by a sort of inward deity urging him on to high and noble deeds, he is compelled to pass his time in some occupation which furnishes him with mere existence, he lives unhappily and dies miserably. Such men as these the Society should search out and use for the furtherance of their object.

The thought struck me for the first time today that our duty to our country may not terminate with the peace – apart, I mean, from the duty of begetting children to bear arms for the King in the next generation. To be more explicit, I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were; and if the present hostilities do not actually merge into a war with our terrible enemy, America, it will remain for those of us who have the necessary knowledge and insight to do what we can where we can to help Britain be victorious again in her next crisis.

Jünger writes that, for man, the ability to set up Types proceeds from a “magic power.” He also notes that nowadays this human aptitude is declining and suggests that we are seeing the rise of the undifferentiated, i.e., a “deterioration of Types,” the most visible sign that the old world is giving way to a new one, whose Types have not yet appeared and thus still cannot be named. “To manage to conceive new Types,” he writes, “the spirit must melt the old ones. . . . It is only in the glimmer of the dawn that the undifferentiated can receive new names.” This is why, in the end, he wants to be confident: “It is foreseeable that man will recover his aptitude to set up Types and will thus return to his supreme competence.”

I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfilment.

And I cannot help asking myself, when I hear of all this misery and of all this suffering; when I know that evidence exists... of a state of demoralisation in the once happy population of this land, which is not equalled in them most barbarous countries... - I cannot help suspecting that this has arisen because property has been permitted to be created and held without the performance of its duties.

If the machinery for distribution in the present economic system of the world is incapable of properly distributing the productive wealth of nations, then that system is false and must be altered. The important part of the present development is the anti-capitalist sentiment that is permeating our people.

While the current terrible economic crisis is ruining or on the way to ruining the medium producers, and the working masses suffer the nightmare of unemployment like never before, the amount of profits obtained by the beneficiaries of the present order, the magnates of the banking system, is extremely high.

Hence the urgent task of the producers is this: To destroy the liberal system, putting an end to political cliques and to the sharks of the banking establishment. But in order to bring this about two possibilities open up: the Communist route or the path of National-Labour ("Nacional-Sindicalismo"). There are no other ways out. The two aspire to pulverize this order of things; the two want a new order.

The struggle for existence has, in short, become a struggle for a place in the community; and these places are reserved for those individuals which in the highest degree possess the co-operative qualities demanded by circumstances.

Society cannot depend [only] on sudras (working class). Nor can you depend [only] on the brahmanas (intelligensia). To fulfil the necessities of your body, there must be a brain, arms, a stomach, and legs. The legs, the brain, and the arms are all required for co-operation to fulfil the mission of the whole body. So in any society you can see that unless there are these four divisions, there will be chaos. It will not work properly. It will be maya, and there will be disturbances. [...] [Y]ou must create a very intelligent class of men, [and] a class of men expert in administration, [and] a class of men expert in production, and a class of men to work. That is required; you cannot avoid it. That is the Vedic conception, mukha-bahuru-pada-jah. Mukha means "the face", bahu means "the arms", uru means "the waist", and pada, "the legs". Whether you take this state or that state, unless there is a smooth, systematic establishment of these four orders of life, the state or society will not run very smoothly.

The sacred involves unconditional respect for something; yet monotheism, in a literal sense, outlaws such respect, placing it outside the Law. For Heidegger, the sacred, das Heilige, is quite distinct from traditional metaphysics and from the very idea of God. We say, to use an antimony favoured by Emmanuel Lévinas, that [b]the sacred vests itself as a mystery in this world, that it is based on an intimacy between man and the world, in contrast to holiness, which relies on the radical transcendence of the Other. Paganism sacralises and thereby exalts this world, whereas Judeo-Christian monotheism sanctifies, and thereby deducts from and diminishes it.

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

So the Great Goddess Amaterasu, alarmed at the noise, said: "The reason for his ascent hither is surely of no good intent. It is only that he wishes to wrest my land from me."

And She forthwith, unbinding Her august hair, twisted it into august bunches; and both into the left and into the right august bunch, as likewise into Her august head-dress and likewise on to Her left and Her right august arm, She twisted an augustly complete string of curved jewels eight feet long, of five hundred jewels, and, slinging on Her back a quiver holding a thousand arrows, and adding thereto a quiver holding five hundred arrows, She likewise took and slung at Her side a mighty and high sounding elbow-pad, and brandished and stuck Her bow upright so that the top shook, and She stamped Her feet into the hard ground up to Her opposing thighs, kicking away the earth like melting snow, and stood valiantly like unto a mighty man, and, waiting, asked: "Wherefore ascendest thou hither?"

The ideal lover of flowers is he who visits them in their native haunts, like Taoyuenming [all celebrated Chinese poets and philosophers], who sat before a broken bamboo fence in converse with the wild chrysanthemum, or Linwosing, losing himself amid mysterious fragrance as he wandered in the twilight among the plum-blossoms of the Western Lake. 'Tis said that Chowmushih slept in a boat so that his dreams might mingle with those of the lotus. It was the same spirit which moved the Empress Komio, one of our most renowned Nara sovereigns, as she sang: "If I pluck thee, my hand will defile thee, O flower! Standing in the meadows as thou art, I offer thee to the Buddhas of the past, of the present, of the future."

However, let us not be too sentimental. Let us be less luxurious but more magnificent. Said Laotse: "Heaven and earth are pitiless." Said Kobodaishi: "Flow, flow, flow, flow, the current of life is ever onward. Die, die, die, die, death comes to all." Destruction faces us wherever we turn. Destruction below and above, destruction behind and before. Change is the only Eternal,--why not as welcome Death as Life? They are but counterparts one of the other,--The Night and Day of Brahma. Through the disintegration of the old, re-creation becomes possible. We have worshipped Death, the relentless goddess of mercy, under many different names. It was the shadow of the All-devouring that the Gheburs greeted in the fire. It is the icy purism of the sword-soul before which Shinto-Japan prostrates herself even to-day. The mystic fire consumes our weakness, the sacred sword cleaves the bondage of desire. From our ashes springs the phoenix of celestial hope, out of the freedom comes a higher realisation of manhood.

Why not destroy flowers if thereby we can evolve new forms ennobling the world idea? We only ask them to join in our sacrifice to the beautiful. We shall atone for the deed by consecrating ourselves to Purity and Simplicity.

The Self is present equally in all beings. There is no one hateful or dear to Me. But, those who worship Me with devotion, they are with Me and I am also with them.

Whatever is endowed with glory, brilliance, and power; know that to be a manifestation of a fraction of My splendor.

As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them and reach them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors.

In dealing with the secret annals and traditions of so many nations, whose very origins have never been ascertained on more secure grounds than inferential suppositions, in giving out the beliefs and philosophy of more than prehistoric races, it is not quite as easy to deal with the subject matter as it would be if only the philosophy of one special race, and its evolution, were concerned. The Secret Doctrine is the common property of the countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which History refuses to deal, and to which esoteric teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology.

It is worth recalling the frequent affirmation made by Marx on the ‘solidity of popular beliefs’ as a necessary element of a specific situation. Another proposition of Marx is that a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant.

[Ombrageux]

Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.

Perhaps my favorite Mishima quote: He profoundly understood something about his own nature and that of (masculine) human nature in general. All boys dream of being generals and emperors, or "president," they dream of the glory and the ideal. This primal fantasy is ultimately incompatible with real human existence - efforts to attain it must end in failure one way or another (and this is true even if, say, an exceptional being like Napoleon had succeeded. But not one to be deterred, his vanity and ambition being immeasurable, Mishima followed his logic and his ideal to their logical conclusion.

[Ombrageux]

Some of my favorites:

But, may the ambitious of the first rank be haunted by such a zeal - artists of effort and leaven of the dough - who see in life no other reason than to make their mark on events and who, from the riverbank which ordinary days fix them at, dream only of the heave of History! Let these ones, despite the turmoil and illusions of the century, not be misled: there has not been an illustrious military career which has not served a great policy, nor a Statesman's great glory which has not was not illuminated the brilliance of national defense.

That faith in modern culture was a gloomy one. It meant that tomorrow was to be in all essentials similar to today, that progress consisted merely in advancing, for all time to be, along a road identical to the one already under our feet. Such a road is rather a kind of elastic prison which stretches on without ever setting us free.

When in the early stages of the Empire some cultured provincial - Lucan or Seneca - arrived in Rome, and saw the magnificent imperial buildings, symbols of an enduring power, he felt his heart contract within him. Nothing could now happen in the world. Rome was eternal. And if there is a melancholy of ruins which rises above them like exhalations from stagnant waters, this sensitive provincial felt a melancholy no less heavy, though of opposite sign: the melancholy of buildings meant for eternity.

Over against this emotional state, is it not clear that the feelings of our time are more like the noisy joy of schoolchildren let loose from school?

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

Look at her today teetering between atomic and spiritual disintegration. […] Europe has reached such a speed, mad and disordered, that she escapes today the control of any conductor, any reason, and that she goes with a horrific vertigo towards abysses which it would be best to quickly distance ourselves from.

We owe to democracy, at least in part, the regime of discussion with which we live; we owe it to the principal modern liberties: those of thought, press and association. And the regime of free discussion is the only one which permits the ruling class to renew itself… which eliminates that class quasi-automatically when it no longer corresponds to the interests of the country.

[A]ll media organizations have an angle, all media organizations have an issue. RT is a voice of Russia, so it looks at things from the Russian agenda. The BBC is a voice of the British government. Voice of America is a voice of the American government. It is the clashing of these voices together that reveals the truth about the world as a whole.

The dream of total freedom animates totalitarian revolutions.

Men have never known the history they were making, but they do not know it any better today. It is good to think of the future but not think that it is already written. Considering the future highlights the limits of our knowledge as much as our knowledge itself. There are no scientists capable of making the societies of tomorrow; the whole of humanity will create them in their unpredictable diversity. The part of responsibility of each [individual] is laughable, but if a few assumed the major responsibility, how many others would have the feeling of being reduced to the state of object, condemned to the bitterness of passivity?

Of course I could quote Aron all day.

[Verv]

"Socialism, like Christianity destroyed itself to gain power" - Alexander Berkman

A very good and poignant quotation.

So tell me, do you still believe in Socialism?

[Goldberk]

So tell me, do you still believe in Socialism?

Put simply, yes. But what is required is first to abandon the scientific socialism of Marxists and return to pre marxian traditions based on community and autonomy.