Political Action Quotes

• Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past - let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

  John F. Kennedy

  4th Of July, Politics Today, Answers

  Speech at Loyola College Alumni Banquet, Baltimore, Maryland, on February 18, 1958. "John F. Kennedy Quotations: Profiles in Courage Quotations", www.jfklibrary.org.

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• Political action is the highest responsibility of a citizen.

  John F. Kennedy

  Responsibility, Political, Citizens

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• Voting is the foundation stone for political action.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Political, Voting, Foundation

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1968). “I Have a Dream: The Quotations of Martin Luther King, Jr”

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• There is a weapon we can fight with. That is the weapon of political action.

  Harry Bridges

  Fighting, Political, Weapons

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• Political action means taking on responsibility. This cannot happen without power. Power is to serve responsibility.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Mean, Responsibility, Political

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• One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.

  Paulo Freire

  Educational, Views, People

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.68, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• To me, political action involves making the politician who represents us know that he either produces or he is out, and he's out one way or another.

  Malcolm X

  Political, Way, Action

  Interview with Robert Penn Warren, whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu. June 2, 1964.

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• All of us can make changes, but the changes that are most needed are not light bulbs and windows but laws and policies and treaties. So, yes, we are in a phase of this (climate protection) struggle where civic and political action is at the top of the list.

  Al Gore

  Struggle, Light, Law

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• If one sets a car on fire, that is a criminal offence. If one sets hundreds of cars on fire, that is political action.

  Ulrike Meinhof

  Fire, Car, Political

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• I don't care much about the outcome. I'd like for people to feel better and have better lives, but I don't think that's in the cards through political action. I think bloodshed is still the way you get dramatic change. That'll never happen because they've got all the guns now. At least they've got the nice guns, the big ones, the ones with night vision.

  George Carlin

  Nice, Feel Better, Gun

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

  Tony Judt

  Believe, Should Have, Political

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• The real focus needs to be on political action to stop this runaway train, real soon.

  William H. Calvin

  Real, Focus, Political

  William H. Calvin (2010). “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change”, p.165, William H. Calvin

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• It is true that some secluded intellectuals in their esoteric circles talk differently. They proclaim the priority of what they call eternal absolute values and feign in their declamations—not in their personal conduct—a disdain of things secular and transitory. But the public ignores such utterances. The main goal of present-day political action is to secure for the respective pressure group memberships the highest material well-being. The only way for a leader to succeed is to instill in people the conviction that his program best serves the attainment of this goal.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Pressure Groups, Circles, Goal

  Ludwig Von Mises (1963). “Human action: a treatise on economics”

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• I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they're participating in some meaningful political action.

  Howard Rheingold

  Meaningful, Thinking, People

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• Most Jewish feminists and gays that I know remain angry and frustrated by Jewish progressives. Deeply committed to progressive causes, frequently in the vanguard of political action, Jewish feminist and gays find ourselves fighting for the rights of others without the secure knowledge that others will fight for us.

  Irena Klepfisz

  Fighting, Gay, Rights

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• power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money.

  Hannah Arendt

  Power, Self, Political

  Origins of Totalitarianism ch. 5 (1951)

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• I think the big turning moment was when I joined the student political action club and started studying nonviolent civil disobedience in response to the Iraq War. The first anti-Bush protest in Atlanta was the first protest that I'd ever been to, and I helped organize the school walkout when I was a junior. It was a really solidifying moment.

  Cecily McMillan

  War, School, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• What is music in America? It's this stand-in for political action in a lot of senses. We have no democracy and we have no art culture, and we've long considered politics nebbish-y and hopelessly unsexy. So a lot of what would be considered political activism is channeled into cultural work.

  Ian Svenonius

  Art, America, Long

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• What I say is, that the real non-resistants can believe in direct action only, never in political action. For the basis of all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through.

  Voltairine de Cleyre

  Real, Believe, Gun

  Voltairine de Cleyre (2012). “Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre -- Anarchist, Feminist, Genius”, p.275, SUNY Press

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• The only reason the president insists on raising [tax] rates is because he knows it will destroy Republican unity, it will cause a complete fracture of the Republican majority in the house, it will hand him a Congress that he can then manipulate for the next two years at least because the Republicans will be neutered. ... This is entirely a political action, a way to get a surrender from the Republicans.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Hands, Years, Two

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• My films can be considered political action against the tyranny of good taste.

  John Waters

  Political, Taste, Action

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• The urge to distribute wealth equally, and still more the belief that it can be brought about by political action, is the most dangerous of all popular emotions. It is the legitimation of envy, of all the deadly sins the one which a stable society based on consensus should fear the most. The monster state is a source of many evils; but it is, above all, an engine of envy.

  Paul Johnson

  Fear, Evil, Envy

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• I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Taken, Thinking, Political

  Terry Tempest Williams (2006). “A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams”, Utah State Univ Pr

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• The essential thing is the formation of the political will of the nation: that is the starting point for political action.

  Adolf Hitler

  Political Will, Essentials, Action

  Adolf Hitler (1994). “The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939: An English Translation of Representative Passages Arranged Under Subjects and Edited by Norman H. Baynes”

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• Human paint, produce films and videos; they dance, dream and make music; they engage in political action, exchange goods, perform rituals, build houses start wars, act in plays, try to please patrons- and so on... They contain patterns, press the practitioners to "conform" and in this way mold their thought, their perception, their actions, and their discriminative abilities.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Dream, War, Play

  Paul Feyerabend (2001). “Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being”, p.28, University of Chicago Press

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