Policy Quotes

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“As she had done when she introduced the US president in Berlin, she addressed him publicly with the informal du for the first time since the NSA controversy in 2013.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“Let me make two remarks. First I concentrate on the task ahead for 2016. I’m quite busy with that—thank you very much. And I’m looking with great interest in the American election campaign.’ For the second time during their press conference, the clicking sounds of the cameras was deafening.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

[Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)]”
― Louis D. Brandeis

“Just because you have stolen someone's heart, luckily owned and occupied as a home, doesn't give you the audacity to enforce hurtful policies.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“While the government is "studying" and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work...
A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.
(pg.87, "Think Little")”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with. I would rather go before the government with two people who have a competent understanding of an issue, and who therefore deserve a hearing, than with two thousand who are vaguely dissatisfied.
But even the most articulate public protest is not enough. We don't live in the government or in institutions or in our public utterances and acts, and the environmental crisis has its roots in our lives. By the same token, environmental health will also be rooted in our lives. That is, I take it, simply a fact, and in the light of it we can see how superficial and foolish we would be to think that we could correct what is wrong merely by tinkering with the institutional machinery. The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“If a policy is wrongheaded feckless and corrupt I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.”
― David Hackworth

“We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift.”
― Al Gore

“If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If we are to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that these measures are forging for them. The country will swarm with informers, spies, delators and all the odious reptile tribe that breed in the sunshine of a despotic power ... [T]he hours of the most unsuspected confidence, the intimacies of friendship, or the recesses of domestic retirement afford no security. The companion whom you most trust, the friend in whom you must confide, the domestic who waits in your chamber, all are tempted to betray your imprudent or unguarded follie; to misrepresent your words; to convey them, distorted by calumny, to the secret tribunal where jealousy presides — where fear officiates as accuser and suspicion is the only evidence that is heard ... Do not let us be told, Sir, that we excite a fervour against foreign aggression only to establish a tyranny at home; that [...] we are absurd enough to call ourselves ‘free and enlightened’ while we advocate principles that would have disgraced the age of Gothic barbarity and establish a code compared to which the ordeal is wise and the trial by battle is merciful and just."

[opposing the Alien & Sedition bills of 1798, in Congress]”
― Edward Livingston

“The building of publicly funded stadiums has become a substitue for anything resembling an urban policy.”
― Dave Zirin, A People's History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play

“Moral and educational suasion breathes the assumption that racist minds must be changed before racist policy, ignoring history that says otherwise. Look at the soaring White support for desegregated schools and neighborhoods decades after the policies changed in the 1950s and 1960s. Look at the soaring White support for interracial marriage decades after the policy changed in 1967. Look at the soaring support for Obamacare after its passage in 2010. Racist policymakers drum up fear of antiracist policies through racist ideas, knowing if the policies are implemented, the fears they circulate will never come to pass. Once the fears do not come to pass, people will let down their guards as they enjoy the benefits. Once they clearly benefit, most Americans will support and become the defenders of the antiracist policies they once feared.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Scholars have long debated whether capital markets lead to appropriate levels of saving and investment for future generations.”
― David L. Weimer, Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice

“English: "By increasing of liberty of politicians, the liberty of citizens goes down and conversely."

Česky: „Zvyšováním svobody politiků klesá svoboda občanů a naopak.”
― Sebastián Wortys, Vtiposcifilo-z/s-ofie

“You think too highly of people, Richard.” Mr. Martian gave a mournful smile. “Probably, you judge by yourself. The rulers of the so-called ‘developed countries’ are cowardly scum and fools who educate their population accordingly. Their ancestors won freedom, and they’ve flushed it down the outhouse. They won’t fight. This is degradation, which is now commonly called ‘progress.”
― Andrew Orange, The Secrets of Mars

“The decision, for instance, to oppose slavery does not depend upon the fact that all men are born free and equal, and that no man is born in chains. For even if all were born free, some men might perhaps try to put others in chains, and they may even believe that they ought to put them in chains. And conversely, even if men were born in chains, many of us might demand the removal of these chains.
[...]
All moral decisions pertain in this way to some fact or other, especially to some fact of social life, and all (alterable) facts of social life can give rise to many different decisions. Which shows that the decisions can never be derivable from these facts, or from a description of these facts.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato

“I thought I had it all figured out. I thought of racism as an inanimate, immortal system, not as a living, recognizable, mortal disease of cancer cells that we could identify and treat and kill. I considered the system as essential to the United States and the Constitution. At times, I thought White people covertly operated the system, fixed it to benefit the total White community at the expense of the total Black community.

The construct of covert institutional racism opens American eyes to racism and, ironically, closes them, too. Separating the overt individual from the covert institutional veils the specific policy choices that cause racial inequities, policies made by specific people. Covering up the specific policies and policymakers prevents us from identifying and replacing the specific policies and policy makers. We become unconscious to racist policymakers and policies as we lash out angrily at the abstract bogeyman of "the system.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Delores, the Wise Woman of Botany, told me while I was in Washington that every seven years, employees of my pay grade are entitled to a sabbatical, and I'm two years late in taking mine. She helped me fill out the form. I listed my purpose: "to study the birds of the southeastern United States with an emphasis on the marshlands of Florida."
Hugh Adamson sputtered an objection, but he couldn't do a thing. Apparently, the sabbatical is a long-standing Smithsonian policy that would actually take an Act of Congress to reverse. I didn't write on the form of my other intention: to freelance, get my name out there, and see whether Florida is where I belong.”
― Virginia Hartman, The Marsh Queen

“It seems Elon Musk follows a policy of halving the staff and making the remaining staff work twice as many hours in companies he acquires!”
― Steven Magee

“modified version of the Chicago Statement that can serve as a template for other schools...:

The [INSTITUTION]'s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the [INSTITUTION] community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the [INSTITUTION] community, not for the [INSTITUTION] as an institution, to make those judgements for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

“My policy of always recording police encounters saved me from toxic police officers in Denver International Airport.”
― Steven Magee

“Instead of a 'just transition' [compensation packages for those whose livelihoods will be affected by climate policy], we need to offer a new compact.
A compact between a Labor Government and those who feel they are being left behind.
And the compact is this: we won't shirk the challenges facing Australia, but we will invest in every single Australian to make sure they are not left behind as we do face them. (p.118)”
― Chris Bowen, On Charlatans

“A policy paralysis can warrant a permanent illness to a functioning state.”
― Qamar Rafiq

“I do not prescribe to the notion that we are here to grow (unless with growth it is meant understanding), but I do prescribe to the notion that we are here for love.”
― Wald Wassermann

“I'm sorry I have trust issues and it's a wise policy!”
― Ifthaker Ahmed "haxdead"fuad

“Ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation to the prejudice and oppression of another is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy...An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“For those with an open mind, it has become increasingly clear that MMT provides a sound basis for developing an understanding of the operation of a monetary economy, enabling economists and political analysts to better understand the nature of the opportunities that are available for policy.”
― Phil Armstrong, Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers

“I judge him to be one who is not false save only in policy.”
― E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros