Michael Haneke Quotes

Political audiences are not fun.

I've always looked upon politics as a very boring thing. Politics never interested me as much as the people involved in it.

In politics there are no bad questions; there are only bad answers.

President Bush should learn to focus on the shades of grey

The only way change happens is when people become more significantly involved in the political process.

I think that life is a paradox and you have to embrace that in your work and your belief systems... You can't be a literalist, and that's the trouble that people always find themselves in. That's why people always hit a wall with any of my stuff, because you can't take it literally.

I always had a respect and an admiration for people who got into politics. I certainly have always been interested in law and political science.

I have two answers to everything and one answer to nothing.

Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be "apolitical" is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.

Frankly, I’m suspicious of anyone who has a strong opinion on a complicated issue.

I guess if you want to know one single thing I'm about, it's that I'm against easy answers.

When things are too clear, they are no longer interesting.

Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

All large political doctrines are rich in difficult problems - problems that are quite above the average citizen's reach. And that is not strange, since they are also above the reach of the ablest minds in the country; after all the fuss and all the talk, not one of those doctrines has been conclusively proven to be the right one and the best.

True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.

I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face.

The other guys are selling certainty. Not me. I'm on the corner with doubt.

Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

What a phrase that is: 'that explains everything!' I know better than to think anything 'explains everything' today.

This book, 'Free bird', is so entangled with politics. I wanted to channel my own internal political monologue in some way to get it out of my brain. I'm not happy that the themes of the book have become more relevant as the publication date nears. Most of it was written in 2014 or so, before the whole Donald Trump thing began. As people paying attention know, the rise of Trump and Trumpism is not an aberration or sudden kind of phenomena.

To get people emotionally involved in something intellectual and political is important.

I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.

No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist.