Polis Quotes

“What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.”
― Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

“Do you know where 'policeman' comes from, sir? ... 'Polis' used to mean 'city', said Carrot. That's what policeman means: 'a man for the city'. Not many people knew that. The word 'polite' comes from 'polis', too. It used to mean the proper behaviour from someone living in a city.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community.
'A polis is not an association for residence on a common site, or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange.' While these conditions are necessary to a polis, they are not sufficient. 'The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“Eğer bir polissen ve barışçıl göstericilere vahşice saldırma emri sana verilmişse, sadece tek bir seçenek seni ‘insan kategorisinde’ tutar: Emri reddetmek ve istifa etmek! Her zaman vicdanının sesini dinle! Kötülerin kötü emirlerini reddet! Bu sana iyi bir şeref getirecektir.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Hayvanların kurumlara alınmadığını söylediğini sanıyordum. Kırk tane polis köpeği herhalde kesinlikle hayvandır öyle değil mi?"

"Polis köpekler aslında düzgün konuşan hayvanlar değildir. Polis köpekleri, hayvan zihniyetinden yoksun sapkın hayvanlardır. Polisler insan mı ki polis köpekleri hayvan olsun?”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“Classical Greece is perhaps the place in which this tension found for a moment an uncertain, precarious equilibirum. In the course of the subsequent political history of the West, the tendency to depoliticise the city by transforming it into a house or a family, ruled by blood relation or by merely economic operations, will alternate together with other, symmetrically opposed phases in which everything that is unpolitical must be mobilised and politicised. In accordance with the prevailing of one or the other tendency, the function, situation and form of civil war will also change. But so long as the words 'family' and 'city', 'private' and 'public', 'economy' and 'politics' maintain an albeit tenuous meaning, it is unlikely that it can ever be eliminated from the political scene of the West.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“The form that civil war has acquired today in world history is terrorism. If the Foucauldian diagnosis of modern politics as biopolitics is correct, and if the genealogy that traces it back to an oikonomical-theological paradigm is equally correct, then global terrorism is the form that civil war acquires when life as such becomes the stakes of politics. Precisely when the polis appears in the reassuring figure of an oikos - the 'Common European Home', or the world as the absolute space of global economic management - then stasis, which can no longer be situated in the treshold between the oikos and the polis, becomes the paradigm of every conflict and re-emerges in the form of terror. Terrorism is the 'global civil war' which time and again invests this or that zone of planetary space. It is no coincidence that the 'terror' should coincide with the moment in which life as such - the nation (which is to say, birth) - became the principle of sovereignty. The sole form in which life as such can be politicised is its unconditioned exposure to death - that is, bare life.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“Sokakta geçen uykusuz gecelerin en berbat tarafı, uyanmak için bomboş bir eve dönmektir.”
― Ahmet Ümit, Beyoğlu'nun En Güzel Abisi