Joseph Kanon Quotes

Chicago ain’t ready for reform!

I'm not really involved with politics... I'm living in my cocoon with my classical music around.

As a personal matter, I stopped voting more than a decade ago, on the grounds that it helped me as an analyst not to think about making a choice in the voting booth.

Hardly anybody in America pays attention to local elections.

I really don't have a lot of interest in national politics, and it's because I'm a skeptic. I think you can accomplish a lot more locally. I don't want to spin the wheels and not get anything done.

Politics goes in one ear and out the other. I don't even know the president's name for sure. That's how stupid I am.

Some city-council people are really awesome, but most are uninspired.

Only in Chicago do they care more about who the mayor is than who's president.

I hope to make clear that involvement in small scale community work can make a difference in our city's politics.

Some politicians are in so long they completely lose touch with reality.

Politics doesn't interest me in the least.

The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.

Jill: 'I don't pay attention to politics.' Ben: 'You should. It's barely less important than your own heart beat.' Jill: 'I don't pay attention to that, either.'

I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.

I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away.

I took a vow of political celibacy.

Americans continue to suffer from a notoriously short attention span. They get mad as hell with reasonable frequency, but quickly return to their families and sitcoms. Meanwhile, the corporate lobbies stay right where they are, outlasting all the populist hysteria.

There's such an aggressively apolitical movement in the US that anything that smells of being political - even the term "political" is so ridiculous, when you think about it. The worst part of governing, the political side, is the grossest part, so that's what they call it. So anything that reeks of that immediately gets tuned out by 70 percent of the population.

When you step away from it all, you lose perspective.

I’ve been dead for seven years, that’s as warm as they get.

What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope?

I was a loner as a child. I had an imaginary friend - I didn't bother with him.

To imagine secret societies and conspiracy is a way not to react to the social and political life. Because you say, "We don't know who they are. We cannot react without reasoning." So it is a way to keep people far from the political environment.

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying that you understand your responsibility, you have a political conscience and you came to vote, but you don't agree with any of the existing parties and this is the only way you have of saying so.

I don't like being consumed by work all the time. I consume myself so much when I do a part that I like to step away from it.