Political Agency Quotes

Politics isn't only about government. Politics is about the people.

It is perfectly evident to any logical mind that when you have got the vote, by the proper use of the vote in sufficient numbers, by combination, you can get out of any legislature whatever you want, or, if you cannot get it, you can send them about their business and choose other people who will be more attentive to your demands.

Life is politics.

If you can't even manage to to force your own presumably democratic governments to allow you to do good things for yourselves, then you probably deserve to become extinct.

I don't write policy for my government.

I had a mother who got involved in grassroot politics when I was growing up. I watched her have agency and become political in a very male-dominated world.

Americans cannot escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate authority rests with the people. We empower the government with our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them.

If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require.

The American Government will be what we all make of it.

People think of politicians having true power, but that's less and less true. After all, they are often constrained or being edged into a corner by a whole series of contingencies.

We ought not to forget that the government, through all its departments, judicial as well as others, is administered by delegated and responsible agents; and that the power which really controls, ultimately, all the movements, is not in the agents, but those who elect or appoint them.

Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent.

I speak for the people I represent, so yes, my voice is heard. One reason they elected me is that their own individual voices may not be heard.

I can't control what other people do or say. I can only control the one vote I've been bestowed upon by the people in the Tennessee Valley.

Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don't talk about what democracy means - what it bestows on us - the revolutionary idea that it isn't just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.

The Democrats are hardly agents of change, or even remotely interesting talkers or reality observers. The workings of actual power in the US is so remote from the ordinary person, who, it seems, can only be victimized by it, but is powerless to change anything.

The people themselves must think, because the people alone can act.

I may find Saddam Hussein's regime abhorrent - any normal person would - but the survival of it is in his hands.

I think the political is personal, and the personal is political.

Growing up in politics I know that women decide all elections because we do all the work.

I know the British people and they are not passengers - they are drivers.

All too often the worst thing that can happen to the young is to depoliticize them. When that happens, not only are young people told that they do not count – your agency is worthless, your experiences are worthless, and your voice should remain silent – but they are also told that there is no alternative to current state of affairs.

I do believe that our ability to jam the Trump brand is somewhat limited. I think we can chip away at it, but ultimately the way to undermine the Trump brand is a better product in the political marketplace, if you'll forgive the capitalist metaphor. I do think that the negative messaging on Trump is severely limited because he is tapping into a very deep, and in many a rightful, desire for deep change, and a feeling that the whole system is so broken and so corrupt that you might as well raise a middle finger as some kind of act of agency.

I think politics is a higher build in life. You know? If you diffuse under normal, common sense of a story, you make it political. If you choose a conventional way for a story, or refuse to use the conventional way, you make it political.

I am not a puppet. I was not made by the West to go to the West or to any other country.