Political Systems Quotes

“You see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there’s nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. “And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, – of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Idealistic socialists in the West usually will tell you that 'socialism' is anything other than what actual socialist governments have achieved in the real world. What is important to keep in mind is that socialism is not a particular set of political conditions, but a specific kind of economic arrangement. Socialism is not identical with left-wing politics, and socialism is not confined to the Left. The various kinds of political systems that have arisen from socialist economies, from Soviet authoritarianism to India’s 'license raj,' are in no small part responses to the inadequacies and contradictions inherent in socialist systems of production and distribution—systems that seek to ignore or to subvert the laws of economics.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

“Democracy is the most popular political system because it demands nearly nothing from the citizen and gives them the ability to pretend to be anything.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those ideas have to be poisoned. That requires not just surveillance, and not merely a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan, a narrative that damages the idea of democracy, wherever it is being used, anywhere in the world.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“All governments stress an employment-intensive force of production, but are unwilling to recognize that jobs can also destroy the use-value of free time. They all stress a more objective and complete professional definition of people's needs, but are insensitive to the consequent expropriation of life.”
― Ivan Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies

“Neither capitalism nor communism, common sense is what works best for humans.”
― Saroj Aryal

“Among the lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none sadder or more striking than this, that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma.”
― James Russell Lowell, Abraham Lincoln

“It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power—the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more. That having called for justice in one instance, one might do it again and again, might call for a just world. It is probably the case that most mainstream Western politicians don't actually care one iota about Israelis or Palestinians and, were the calculus of electoral self-interest to shift, would happily back whatever position serves their own interests best. But what about a population whose inability to countenance genocide spreads outward, becomes an inability to countenance what the same political systems will do and will always allow to happen to so much of the planet in the name of endless extraction, endless more? Such a thing puts the entire ordering at risk.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This