Policy Quotes

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“As she had done when she introduced the US president in Berlin, she addressed him publicly with the informal du for the first time since the NSA controversy in 2013.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“Let me make two remarks. First I concentrate on the task ahead for 2016. I’m quite busy with that—thank you very much. And I’m looking with great interest in the American election campaign.’ For the second time during their press conference, the clicking sounds of the cameras was deafening.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“An Affair With The Media
Being President presupposes a relationship with the media. One does have control over the intimacy of that connection.
My media association might be best represented by the following interview, recently undertaken for this book:
“What do you think of Newstime’s review of your book, Madam President?”
“Newstime’s review? Surely you mean Bill Bologna who works for Newstime?”
“Well, yes.”
“Now, Bill Bologna. What has he published?”
“He’s a critic. He does reviews.”
“Oh, he gets paid for reading what other people have published and then writing what he thinks of their writing?”
― Nancy Omeara, The Most Popular President Who Ever Lived [So Far]

“After iris-scanning was legally accepted as identity verification for drivers licenses, passports and so much more, anyone could securely log onto the Internet from any computer anywhere via such a scan.
Elections (much less air travel) have never been the same”
― Nancy Omeara, The Most Popular President Who Ever Lived [So Far]

“Senator Collins and Speaker Bowling are two cuts or more above typical politicians. If all politicians modeled their examples, we’d have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
― Shafter Bailey, James Ed Hoskins and the One-Room Schoolhouse: The Unprosecuted Crime Against Children

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

[Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)]”
― Louis D. Brandeis

“Just because you have stolen someone's heart, luckily owned and occupied as a home, doesn't give you the audacity to enforce hurtful policies.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“While the government is "studying" and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work...
A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.
(pg.87, "Think Little")”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with. I would rather go before the government with two people who have a competent understanding of an issue, and who therefore deserve a hearing, than with two thousand who are vaguely dissatisfied.
But even the most articulate public protest is not enough. We don't live in the government or in institutions or in our public utterances and acts, and the environmental crisis has its roots in our lives. By the same token, environmental health will also be rooted in our lives. That is, I take it, simply a fact, and in the light of it we can see how superficial and foolish we would be to think that we could correct what is wrong merely by tinkering with the institutional machinery. The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“If a policy is wrongheaded feckless and corrupt I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.”
― David Hackworth

“We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift.”
― Al Gore

“Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on 'The Survival of the Fittest.' These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.”
― Mark Twain

“If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If we are to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that these measures are forging for them. The country will swarm with informers, spies, delators and all the odious reptile tribe that breed in the sunshine of a despotic power ... [T]he hours of the most unsuspected confidence, the intimacies of friendship, or the recesses of domestic retirement afford no security. The companion whom you most trust, the friend in whom you must confide, the domestic who waits in your chamber, all are tempted to betray your imprudent or unguarded follie; to misrepresent your words; to convey them, distorted by calumny, to the secret tribunal where jealousy presides — where fear officiates as accuser and suspicion is the only evidence that is heard ... Do not let us be told, Sir, that we excite a fervour against foreign aggression only to establish a tyranny at home; that [...] we are absurd enough to call ourselves ‘free and enlightened’ while we advocate principles that would have disgraced the age of Gothic barbarity and establish a code compared to which the ordeal is wise and the trial by battle is merciful and just."

[opposing the Alien & Sedition bills of 1798, in Congress]”
― Edward Livingston

“History is littered with the wars everybody knew could never happen.”
― Enoch Powell

“The building of publicly funded stadiums has become a substitue for anything resembling an urban policy.”
― Dave Zirin, A People's History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play

“Moral and educational suasion breathes the assumption that racist minds must be changed before racist policy, ignoring history that says otherwise. Look at the soaring White support for desegregated schools and neighborhoods decades after the policies changed in the 1950s and 1960s. Look at the soaring White support for interracial marriage decades after the policy changed in 1967. Look at the soaring support for Obamacare after its passage in 2010. Racist policymakers drum up fear of antiracist policies through racist ideas, knowing if the policies are implemented, the fears they circulate will never come to pass. Once the fears do not come to pass, people will let down their guards as they enjoy the benefits. Once they clearly benefit, most Americans will support and become the defenders of the antiracist policies they once feared.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Scholars have long debated whether capital markets lead to appropriate levels of saving and investment for future generations.”
― David L. Weimer, Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice

“[...] I cannot in any degree approve of those restless and busy meddlers who, called neither by birth nor fortune to take part in the management of public affairs, are yet always projecting reforms; and if I thought that this [treatise] contained [anything] which might justify the suspicion that I was a victim of such folly, I would by no means permit its publication.”
― René Descartes, Discourse on Method

“. . . decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences . . . Rather, people care about their GROUPS, whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political . . . Political opinions function as "badges of social membership." They're like the array of bumper stickers people put on their cars showing the political causes, universities, and sports teams they support. Our politics is groupish, not selfish.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“I had escaped from my prior partisan mind-set (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later) and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society. It felt good to be released from partisan anger. And once I was no longer angry, I was no longer committed to reaching the conclusion that righteous anger demands: we are right, they are wrong. I was able to explore new moral matrices, each one supported by its own intellectual traditions. It felt like a kind of awakening.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“While the power sector in Japan is traditionally relationship-driven, the pay-as-bid LTDA auction rewards pure cost-efficiency, enabling capable foreign developers to compete on merit. The number of foreign players successfully bidding in the auctions sends a strong signal that Japan is creating a more level playing field.”
― Malte Susen

“We can choose to be the Incarceration Nation or, once again, become the land of the free.”
― Andrew Drasen, A Vision of Hope: A Story of Redemption and Purpose

“Trade wars and tariffs are written in numbers—but human hardship is written in lost homes, canceled crops, and closed horizons.”
― Lawrence Nault

“When science is disbanded in the name of policy, public health becomes political theater—and the audience is the world’s children.”
― Lawrence Nault

“When systems forget people, people must remember each other. That’s how change begins—not in policy, but in presence.”
― Lawrence Nault

“The permanent antidote to crime is education alone, Law ‘n policy are just to ensure its true democratization. More than trying a crime, focus on treating environment. Feed the hungry ‘n establish education, free from any debt.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables

“A nation’s progress cannot be measured solely in economic terms. Growth that excludes dignity, justice, and equity is hollow and unstable. Sustainable development begins when policy places human well-being above political convenience.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava