Italo Calvino Quotes

The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.

This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

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.

Whether it's 'Veep' or 'Homeland' or 'The West Wing' - which is a more idealised version of democracy - people are fascinated by politics.

The Right-wingers everywhere take themselves too seriously, whether in the U.S. or the U.K. And, by the way, so does the Left. The Left can take itself a little too seriously as well.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

The menace is ideology, the dogma of politics. It is a prison that makes the American experiment impossible.

I was a Socialist for two weeks but when a couple of Socialists assured me I had no right to think differently from any other Socialist and then quarreled with each other about what Socialism meant, I ran away.

If a poet would influence politics he must join a party, and then he is lost as a poet: goodbye to his free spirit and his open mind.

Politics consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all.

One cannot be a Communist and preserve an iota of one's personal integrity.

There are certain catchwords which have a marvelous charm to calm the breast political, a magic power to levitate the mind captivated by them, out of the regions of mere argument and recognition of facts. Such a hold do these words and the deified abstractions they cover have on the average man of the nineteenth century, that they and they alone are worshipped as the ultimate manifestation of goodness, beauty, and truth. To be opposed to these abstractions is to be condemned as blasphemous against the first principles of rectitude, moral and political.

I dread the reveries of you philosophic politicians.

I once had considerable expectations from Congress, But since they adopted the fiery resolves of … Massachusetts, all hope of good from them has vanished

Politics or ideology must not get in the way of sound planning..

In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics.

When I was very young and came into politics, I basically thought ideas would do the trick.

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

I request the audience to not mix cinema with politics.

I don't believe in populism.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

I hate the idea that we might lose even a few talented future leaders because they fell for Bernie Sanders's spiel and then got discouraged when it didn't pan out.

You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake.

One of the big mysteries for many conservatives for many, many moons - including me - was the existence of liberal Jews who put liberalism before their Judaism.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.