Politics Quotes

“Junk food clogs your arteries, sends your blood pressure up and makes you fat; junk news causes political hypertension, cognitive cholesterol, flabby thinking.”
― Rafael Behr, Politics: A Survivor's Guide: How to Stay Engaged without Getting Enraged

“Clive James once described this restless impatience induced in some people by a surfeit of stability: ‘For them, a political system which has attained a condition of vibrating stasis provides an insufficient resonance. Briefly, they find it boring. Bored, they play with fire.”
― Rafael Behr, Politics: A Survivor's Guide: How to Stay Engaged without Getting Enraged

“An ideologue is someone whose theory collides with reality and demands that reality step aside.”
― Rafael Behr, Politics: A Survivor's Guide: How to Stay Engaged without Getting Enraged

“A trans woman can be a woman and also not a woman in exactly the same way that someone born into a woman’s body has always experienced being a woman.”
― Rafael Behr, Politics: A Survivor's Guide: How to Stay Engaged without Getting Enraged

“We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.”
― Rafael Behr, Politics: A Survivor's Guide: How to Stay Engaged without Getting Enraged

“And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop . . . You’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
― Rafael Behr, Politics: A Survivor's Guide: How to Stay Engaged without Getting Enraged

“There is a quote usually attributed to Napoleon but not reliably sourced to him: ‘To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.’ In truth, you need a lot more information”
― Rafael Behr, Politics: A Survivor's Guide: How to Stay Engaged without Getting Enraged