Political Change Quotes

For me, and maybe for many religious kids of the '60s, the church lost relevance the more it became a surrogate in the movement for social and political change.

I don't think you can work on feelings in politics, apart from anything else, political change can come very unexpectedly, sometimes overnight when you least expect it.

I have a somewhat sneaky way of effecting political change.

I witnessed a lot of violence, and I found myself asking the question: Do you ever use violence to try to bring about political change?

Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.

It is the first time in the history of Rwanda that political change in the highest leadership of the country has taken place in peace and security.

Political changes and reforms do not usually favor the general populace. They benefit those who are positioned to best organize and advocate for their policies.

Significant and seemingly impossible social and political change happens more often than we think, and it happens more rapidly than we realize. Even the most momentous change is always possible if one finds the right way to make it happen.

The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas engender social institutions, political changes, technologi- cal methods of production, and all that is called economic conditions.

Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused though society.

The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.

The rout of fascism, in which the Soviet Union played the decisive role, generated a mighty tide of socio-political changes which swept across the globe.

I think we've seen at least the beginnings of rather significant social and economic change in the Muslim world, which I think will in due course lead to more political change.

I think it's hard sometimes for people to grapple with the real-life consequences of political change. I think that, we as a culture, feel like politics is one sector of our lives that can feel apart from our personal lives and the cultural things we're interested in and the sports we watch. It feels like this separate, different thing.

Some believe that the only way to remove the authoritarian regime and replace it with a democratic one is through violent means. I would like to set the precedent of political change through political settlement, not through violence.

Political change does not really lead to any fundamental change for most of the people, indeed because politics (even if it calls itself democratic) is elitist and barred to most people, so it is necessary to look to new movements outside of "politics."

Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live...They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them.

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party

Major efforts have to be undertaken to bring the general public to understand the real reasons for their plight, and the possibilities for radical social and political change to construct meaningful popular control of all institutions - in communities, in the workplace, in the larger society, and on to the international order.

The United States is in the midst of many spirited political debates about national priorities and public spending... However, we have found that science is an area where both political parties can find common ground, and in which political change does not necessarily create discontinuities.

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.

Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.

So efficient are the available instruments of slavery; fingerprints, lie detectors, brain washings, gas chambers; that we shiver at the thought of political change which might put these instruments in the hands of men of hate.

A discourse for broad-based political change is crucial for developing a politics that speaks to a future that can provide sustainable jobs, decent health care, quality education and communities of solidarity and support for young people.

One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people's lives, with real individuals.

My feeling is that most political poetry is preaching to the choir, and that the people who are going to make the political changes in our lives are not the people who read poetry, unfortunately. Poetry not specifically aimed at political revolution, though, is beneficial in moving people toward that kind of action, as well as other kinds of action. A good poem makes me want to be active on as many fronts as possible.

Believe me, the intellectual revolution is going on, and that has to come first before you see the political changes. That's where I'm very optimistic.

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.

George W. Bush was a very bad president. The Iraq war was a big mistake. The U.S.A. needed a political change. I hoped Barack Obama could be a good president, but I'm disappointed. He hasn't done well.

I think we should be prepared, given environmental and political change for large-scale migration. If sea levels rise and 200 million people in Bangladesh and 300 million people in Indonesia need to move, and the entire Chinese seaboard, New York City - that's going to be huge.

The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.

We, the monarchs, are undoubtedly constants in a constantly changing world. Because we have always been there, but also because we do not get involved in everyday politics. We are aware of the political changes in our societies, but we don't comment on them. This is where we assume a unique position.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they dont realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.

The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur.

Americans' liberty is perishing beneath the constant growth of government power. Federal, state and local government's are confiscating citizens' property, trampling their rights, and decimating their opportunities more than ever before.... American liberty can still be rescued from the encroachments of government. The first step to saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose unless fundamental political changes occur.

Certainly Amadeus because it was a very powerful time for me, we filmed it in the Czech Republic at a time of lots of social and political change going on in that part of the world.

In Christian terms, evangelization and humanization are not alternatives. Nor are the vertical dimension of faith and the horizontal dimension of love for ones neighbor and political change.

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order.

If I was writing a lifestyle book it would have the same advice on every page, and you’d know it all already. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, and live your whole life in every way as well as you can: exercise regularly as part of your daily routine, avoid obesity, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke, and don’t get distracted from the real, basic, simple causes of ill health. But as we will see, even these things are hard to do on your own, and in reality require wholesale social and political changes.

We also have to engage - and I think this is important - in national politics because there is no way to address questions of this scale in the short time that we have to address them without engaging in real political change.

In trying to address the systemic problem of racial injustice, we would do well to look at abolitionism, because here is a movement of radicals who did manage to effect political change. Despite things that radical movements always face, differences and divisions, they were able to actually galvanize the movement and translate it into a political agenda.

The profound political changes we need in order to heal our planet will not come about through fragmented problem solving or intellectual analyses that overlook the deepest yearnings and intuitions of the heart....As we begin to cultivate a rich inner life and experience our connection with all life, we realize how little of what society tells us we need is actually important for our well-being....Green politics must address the spiritual vacuum of industrial society.

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.

Women in the Arab world have a rich history in their active participation in political change from the Algeria revolution against the French occupation to the most recent revolution in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya among other countries. The question is not their participation. Their question is the incorporation of women's voices fully in the new definitions of the countries where change has happened.

They're willing to accept changes on the part of the U.S. that contribute to more money entering Cuba so they can benefit. But in terms of political changes on the island, an opening, etc., that won't happen, that won't change, and I've always said that, from the beginning. I've even said that it doesn't matter how many tourists who to Cuba, how many times the President visits Cuba; there won't be any changes in the Cuban government's posture. And that is the same as always.

People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.

Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture.

It would be a huge mistake to abandon democracy promotion. Peaceful political change has been enormously successful in the past years in Eastern European countries as well as in countries like South Korea, South Africa, Chile and Indonesia. However, if possible, the use of force is something to avoid except in cases where genocide is threatened, like Bosnia or Libya or with regimes that threaten our security, like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.