All Quotes By Tag: Politics

“The very fact that ‘the mystical’ is seen as irrelevant to issues of social and political authority itself reflects contemporary, secularized notions of and attitudes toward power. The separation of the mystical from the political is itself a political decision!”

“I think all the politicians in Brazil use God. They always present themselves as the defenders of God. This is because power searches for its legitimation starting from God, religious legitimation. (Carlos Mesers, p. 123)”

“فقصة فرعون ليست حكاية تخص المصريين القدماء، بل نموذج يلزم محوه من حياة المصريين إلى الأبد. إن القرآن – فى منهج الجماعة – لا يلعن فرعون الميت منذ ثلاثة آلاف سنة، بل يلعن فرعون الحي، الذي يتناول إفطاره هذا الصباح فى قلعة عسكرية سرق نفقاتها من مال الناس العام، وسط حراسة مشددة من سيافين محترفين، يدفع رواتبهم من مال الناس نفسه.”

“I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.”

“انقلب تفسير المفهومات، فلم يعد الكافر، هو فرعون الذي طغى فى البلاد، بل أصبح المواطن الذي يخرج عن طاعته. وقد اتفقت مذاهب الفقه، على إهدار دم الخارج على السلطان، بحجة أنه خارج على الجماعة، من دون أن يهدر احد دم السلطان نفسه الذي استباح حق الجماعة بأسرها.”

“Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always been speakers and writers who embody Einstein’s injunction to ‘remember your humanity and forget the rest.’ It would be immodest to claim membership in this fraternity/sorority, but I hope not to have done anything to outrage it. Despite the idiotic sneer that such principles are ‘fashionable,’ it is always the ideas of secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity that stand in need of reaffirmation.”

“But I can no longer ready any faith’s Napoleonic saber rattling without picturing smoking rubble on cable news. I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I’d go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn’t want it.”

“I am fashionably unimpressed with the material world. I am moved by the beauty of aspiration, and I hope that I can elevate myself to the standards I have imposed on others.”

“No one is as murderously ‘Islamophobic’ as Islamists are.”

“The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and ethnic dictatorship in the Balkans took precedence. This, by the way, was partly a battle to save Muslims from Catholic and Christian Orthodox killers. That impressed me. The neo-cons also took the view, quite early on, that coexistence with Saddam Hussein was impossible as well as undesirable. They were dead right about that. They had furthermore been thinking about the menace of jihadism when most people were half-asleep.And then I have to say that I was rather struck by the way that the Weekly Standard and its associated voices took the decision to get rid of Trent Lott earlier this year, thus removing an embarrassment as well as a disgrace from the political scene. And their arguments were on points of principle, not ‘perception.’ I liked their ruthlessness here, and their seriousness, at a time when much of the liberal Left is not even seriously wrong, but frivolously wrong, and babbles without any sense of responsibility. (I mean, have you read their sub-Brechtian stuff on Halliburton….?) And revolution from above, in some states and cases, is—as I wrote in my book A Long Short War—often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.”

“London is one of the world’s centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; ‘Islamophobic’ to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.”

“For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew–or a Quaker–or a Unitarian–or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you–until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril. Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end–where all men and all churches are treated as equal–where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice–where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind–and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood. That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe–a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office….This is the kind of America I believe in–and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a “divided loyalty,” that we did “not believe in liberty,” or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the “freedoms for which our forefathers died.”

“I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation’s official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person’s philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church.”

“[The haggadah] was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story.”What do you mean?”Well, from what you’ve told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You’ve got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything’s humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize ‘the other’ — it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists… same old, same old. It seems to me that the book, at this point, bears witness to all that.”

“My reading of American religious history is that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power. Once you identify the faith with a particular candidate or party or with the quest for political influence, ultimately it is the faith that suffers. Compromise may work in politics. It’s less appropriate to the realm of faith and belief.”