Fred Frith Quotes

So I think that we're in a very heightened and somewhat unusual period of politics and polling around the countries that New Zealanders take close interest in.

In the business of politics, emotions and productive dissatisfaction with the world in which we live today are gradually being covered up by the minutiae of ordinary life.

The way politics divides the world is into friend and enemy.

A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.

Conservatism, by all means, if there is anything worth conserving, and everything not worth losing. Revolution, if there is nothing worth conserving, and everything worth gaining. These are the class lines upon which the political battle is being fought, and is bound to be fought

I am basically a supporter of Barack Obama - it is not easy to be a post-partisan president in a hyper-partisan era.

I think 'The East' is political.

We are affectionate BJP and not fascist as termed by the opposition.

The propagandistic American 'media' and the crazed neoconservatives have set humanity on the path to destruction.

I think it's probably much easier to do political comedy from a two-party point of view, in that the majority have some sense of what it means to be one or the other.

Ezra Klein gets under my skin. He seems to spout the party line.

British politics is more nuanced. Part of the problem with New Labour is that they are a moving target.

Whereas all liberals are thought to erupt self-righteously whenever they feel like it, conservatives believe that they themselves are never permitted to say what they really think.

When facing the public, politicians constantly filter their ideas through a political sieve. 'How will this affect the environmentalists, labor, management?' Sometimes the sieve gets so clogged by political taboos that no new ideas pass through.

There's something about Barack Obama that induces Americans to imagine what they cannot see. The Right envisions a vile socialist, while many on the Left picture an inspired liberal, politically restrained in his first term but now free to pursue his true beliefs.

Well it's really hard to satisfy the right wing. I can tell you that.

As in nature, politics abhors a vacuum. Without a strong voice for more moderate leadership, the Tea Party is filling that vacuum.

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.

People have different relationships with power. I suppose a large portion of the 'Homeland' audience aligns with the U.S., sort of against the enemies. We certainly have the CIA viewpoint on the world - and it's their job.

So many people of my generation who served in the government were prisoners of the Cold War culture, still are.

There's the great line: the definition of a liberal is someone who's afraid to take their own side in a fight. And that's my problem with my fellow liberals.

Graham Greene, as I understand it, was quite outspoken in his criticism of American foreign policy.

Democrats couldn't care less if people in Indiana hate them. But if Europeans curl their lips, liberals can't look at themselves in the mirror.

Most centrist Democrats... try to distance themselves from controversies that recall the 1960s. There are journalistic centrists as well, who avoid hard truths for the sake of acceptance and legitimacy.

The administration still wants to govern from the far-left and that's going to produce kind a partisan result here in the Congress.