Community Politics Quotes

Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in my town that each individual vote really does matter, and several local races have been decided by as many votes as you can count on one hand.

The political philosophy of black nationalism means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community; no more.

The black church is dormant, much of the community is dormant. If the black church is leaning toward the right, much of the community is leaning toward the right. If it is leaning in the left wing direction having repercussions.

I think that the black people in this country have the reached the point where they should reserve the right to do whatever is necessary to see that they exercise complete control over the politicians in the politician, in the politics of their own community by whatever means necessary.

The Vietnamese and the Republicans are, with an intensity, trying to take this seat from which we have done so much for our community - to take this seat and give it to this Van Tran, who is very anti-immigrant and very anti-Hispanic.

I think all politics is local.

There's no hidden agenda, no political agenda [in Patriots Day]. The only politics we were really talking about was the politics of community, the politics of social love.

I think if you worked at the community level in Chicago and then a politician on the South Side of Chicago, and worked at the state level, then you're pretty familiar with all the variations of politics in the African American community and criticisms you may get. If you're not familiar with those or you don't have a thick enough skin to take it, then you probably wouldn't have gotten here.

The Bush Administration thought of politics as the relationship between individuals and the state and so it failed to recognize that the people of the Middle East see politics as the balance of power between communities.

I grew up in a place that didn't have any Democrats, or if there were Democrats they weren't talking about it.

New England has a strong tradition of localism. What is ordinarily called election day in most of the United States is called town meeting day in Vermont.

Barack Obama is a street corner community organizer who is using the office of the presidency here to virtually undermine it.

When one set of Jews labels another set of Jews 'anti-Semitic,' they are trying to monopolize the right to speak in the name of the Jews. So the allegation of anti-Semitism is actually a cover for an intra-Jewish quarrel.

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

It shows courage, and it shows commitment to move beyond the status-quo politics of rhetoric, which is all the Cuban-American community has received from any party for the last half century.

What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what's going on in your own community.