After more than a year off the rail, I’m trying to get my dissertation train back on the track. My topic focus returns to the subject of my master’s thesis: improving political discourse through mediated systems. One of the ways I tried to make sense of this new/old direction is to assemble a collection of interesting, non-academic quotes.
These are some of my favorites:
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.—Plato
The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.—Norman Cousins
A leader who loses his connection to his people soon loses the ability to lead them.—Robert Ley
All this technology for connection and what we really only know more about is how anonymous we are in the grand scheme of things.—Heather Donahue
Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.—Martha Beck
In the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection.—Carol Gilligan
[P]artisan attachments powerfully shape political perceptions, beliefs and values, and incumbents enjoy advantages well beyond the way in which their districts are configured.—Thomas E. Mann
It’s nice to say let’s be bipartisan. But we’re a partisan nation. We were raised as a partisan nation.—Colin Powell
The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.—Walter Lippmann
[P]arty labels do not ensure unanimity any more than trying to cast the challenge we confront as a people through a partisan prism.—J. D. Hayworth
If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.—Thomas Wolfe
It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.—Robert Anton Wilson
Quotes like these become touchstones for more work, allowing me to remember some of the motivating notions that drive the research while encouraging me to continue searching for better ones that fit with my results.