Janeane Garofalo Quotes

The leaders who we admire who have been able to bring great change in the past - Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela - they're all inspirational religious leaders and smart tacticians. It would be nice to find the Muslim Gandhi, wouldn't it?

I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time.

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.

Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.

Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.

I think today that politics registers very late things which society manifests through other channels, and I feel that often politics distorts and mystifies reality.

George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.

There are many people making a difference. I mean, Dr. King never held an office. Gandhi never held an office. There are people who are archetypes in our society who have never held office and made a difference.

It's important to ask candidates about their beliefs, in part because politicians frequently exploit religious faith - often with the idea that voters will be more likely to unthinkingly accept certain political positions so long as they arise from religious belief.

From time to time, you have seminal personalities who really change the way the world sees itself - people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. Warren Buffett is that kind of person in the business world.

It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.

We cost the Democratic party the opportunity to demagogue the issue of race forever. And I am damn proud of that.

The liberals of both the Democratic and Republican Parties are the instruments of Satan to destroy the former great principles of these two political parties.

I don't believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans aren't that desperate for victory.

The agents that move politicks are the popular passions, and those are ever ... under the command of the disturbers of society.

I remember back in the 1960s - late '50s, really - reading a comic book called 'Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story.' Fourteen pages. It sold for 10 cents. And this little book inspired me to attend non-violence workshops, to study about Gandhi, about Thoreau, to study Martin Luther King, Jr., to study civil disobedience.

Following the teaching of Gandhi and Thoreau, Dr. King, it set me on a path. And I never looked back.

As someone who is on the more liberal side of things, I personally think this side needs to be a little less open. I know that's part of what it means to be on the more liberal side of things, but that trait can no longer really be a part of our makeup. The simple reason for this is that the opposing side uses our openness to their full advantage.

The preachers are the greatest problem in the United States of America.

Conservatism solves problems. Libralism blows 'em up.

Some people try deliberately to exploit the colonial hangover for their own purpose, to serve an external force. To us, Communism is as bad as imperialism.

The shortest way to change a radical into a conservative, a liberal into a tyrant, a man into a beast, is to give him power over his fellows.

If we are nonviolent through and through, our nonviolence would have been self-evident.

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).