While the struggle for religious liberty had proceeded without large-scale bloodshed in New England and elsewhere in the United States, the struggle for political liberty had not fared so well.
What is new is the multiplying reach and volume of the Internet, concentrating the toxicity of destructive emotions and circulating them in the political bloodstream with unparalleled velocity.
The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.
The polarization of Congress; the decline of civility; and the rise of attack politics in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early years of the new century are a blot on our political system and a disservice to the American people.
Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too.
I have three favorite politicians: Reagan, Truman, and Bobby Kennedy - Bobby for showing remarkable political courage despite being loathed by many on both sides.
My hope that Thatcher would inadvertently bring about a new political revolution was well and truly bogus. All that sprang out of Thatcherism were extreme financialisation, the triumph of the shopping mall over the corner store, the fetishisation of housing and Tony Blair.
Jason McDermott's political career, however bogus, appears to have had an early and promising start.
Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn't be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn't be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway.
Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution.
Bolshevism presented itself as an economic threat to themselves at the same time that Nazism presented itself as a political threat to their countries.
Nationalism is a tool increasingly used by leaders to bolster their authority, especially amid difficult economic and political conditions.
Roja,' 'Bombay' and 'Dil Se' weren't planned as political films. It was a phase India was going through and these things affected me and found their way into my work.
People bring up Willie Horton or some other political bombshell in the past, but what they're not being intellectually honest about is if we do not work on early release, if we do not rehabilitate 95 percent of the people who go into the prison system and come out, far more innocent people are going to be harmed.
What we call politics now and what most political writers write about is the empathy and the bonding and the word choice and the horse rights, and it has nothing to do with what's really happening to people's lives.
There are millions of Americans who belong by nature in movie theaters as they belong at political rallies or in fortuneteller parlors and on the shoot-the-chutes. To these millions, the movies are a sort of boon - a gaudier version of religion.
The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres - economic, political and humanitarian - and has imposed itself on other states.
A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness.
I would watch 'The Ed Sullivan Show' and borrow a few lines here and there from guests like Red Buttons and Buddy Hackett to create a routine. Then I started getting invited to do political functions like the governor's birthday ball or mayor's dinner.
I think that both parties should declare the debt limit as a political weapon of mass destruction which can't be used. I mean, it is silly to have a country that has 237 years building up its reputation and then have people threaten to tear it down because they're not getting some other matter.
