Civic Disengagement Quotes

I don't vote.

Our nation, frustrated by its desire for full employment and political responsibility, is becoming a huge land of individuals who roam stranding in place, one eye on the television and the other on their passports.

The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.

I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.

I'm a very bad citizen. I've never even voted.

I'm almost totally politically inactive.

Going back to why people don't vote, I presume the main reason is because they understand without reading political science texts that it doesn't make any difference how they vote. It's not going to affect policy, so why bother?

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

In North America, people get a sense that something is really wrong in government and in our culture. There is a corruption, not only in politics, but of spirit as well, when people are so quick to be violent with one another. I think everybody would like to be able to find a solution to make things better. We have the desire to reform inside of us, and we get frustrated because we don't know how to change things, even if it comes to our own behavior. Sometimes you get frustrated because you don't know how to stop that thing that you know is either hurtful to yourself or someone else.

The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.

The extremely low respect Congress enjoys among the population indicates that the citizens understand broadly what's going on. But the lack of a realistic political reform path leads to apathy and the kind of mindless frustration that manifests itself in the Tea Party-style hatred of any and all government.

In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.

The state inherited a tradition of alienation from government combined with an equally ingrained tradition of passive dependence on government aid.

Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty; it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic.

There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.

The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.

I think we all have a tendency to feel like, "Well, what can I do? I can't influence the government or politics in my country."

If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many American citizens are now idiots. And I should not be surprised, although I don't know, if there were some such idiots even in Germany.

Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them

Both parties are impossibly corrupt and the public thoroughly indifferent.

More dangerous than voting for change... is that people no longer vote because they have lost trust not only in governments but in democracy.

There are many young Americans that are very distant from our political process.

We must face the bitter fact that we have forsaken our great dream of a life of, for, and by the people; that the burning passions and ideals of the American dream lie congealed by cold cynicism. Great parts of the masses of our people no longer believe that they have a voice or a hand in shaping the destiny of this nation. They have not forsaken democracy because of any desire or positive action of their own; they have been driven down into the depths of a great despair born of frustration, hopelessness, and apathy. A democracy lacking in popular participation dies of paralysis.

What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols.

Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.