Fisher Ames Quotes

Europe is filled with the very elements of social combustion.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

Riot is the voice of the unheard.

There's a battle outside raging It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls for the times they are a-changing.

You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.

So long as we have government by party, the very notion of repose must be foreign to English politics. Agitation is, so to speak, endowed in this country. There is a standing machinery for producing it. There are rewards which can only be obtained by men who excite the public mind, and devise means of persuading one set of persons that they are deeply injured by another.

It’s the confrontation with modernity that produces terrorism.

I have never regarded politics as an arena of morals. It is the arena of interests.

The diabolical influence of communism on youth was manifested in the ... communist inspired riots in San Francisco, where students were duped into disgraceful demonstrations against a Congressional committee.

Politics, like religion, hold up torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.

Social change can be painful for all involved—oppressor and oppressed.

Pat Buchanan likes to say we're in a culture war. The Civil War was a culture war, and brothers killed brothers. I wonder if they avoided dinner conversation about politics. What if this culture war turned into a real war? I'd look back on that dinner and wish that I'd ordered a side of argument

The real cause of this, as all real popular movements, not stimulated by the aristocracy, … was an apprehension on the part of the people, that their civil rights were invaded.

… all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

Most governments and people want reform. It’s the prospect of change that makes reform rare.

Everything changes.... Social life changes, and with it the "national question" changes, too. At different periods different classes enter the arena, and each class has its own view of the "national question." Consequently, in different periods the "national question" serves different interests and assumes different shades, according to which class raises it, and when.

The fact that the young, perceiving themselves at a turning point in history, do not feel at home in the society and wish to change it, is a sign of portentous changes and of the difficult travails within which a new humanity is born.

Social stability is ensured, not by the cessation of the demand for change – for the needy and the restless will never cease to cry for it – but by the fact that change in its progress must at last hurt some class of men who are strong enough to arrest it.

You had better — all you people at the South — prepare yourselves for a settlement of this [slavery] question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it.

In every sort of politics, in history, it has its own problems, its leaders, its own opposition.

Politics lives in people, ideas live in people, they live in the concrete struggles that people have.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

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.

You can bring down governments, you can do a lot of things that are in your own interests even though liberals will get very antsy when you start talking about it.

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.