I keep telling these millennials it's all about them to get into politics and start making things happen. They don't care about whether or not someone is gay. They don't care to see contraception taken away or want to even discuss it. They're going forward, not backward.
I deeply believe - and not just as a matter of politics, but even as a matter of morality - that matters about reproduction and intimacy and relationships and contraception are in the personal realm. They're moral decisions for individuals to make for themselves. And the last thing we need is government intruding into those personal decisions.
When you go after someone who has a deep ideological belief set that is contradictory with your own, it's conversion. Conversion is hard. Conversion is miraculous. We have entire religions built around the idea of conversion. Politics is not a religion. Politics is about persuasion.
Those of us who work in politics can only make ourselves useful if our heads are filled with things that we can contribute to the political space.
In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.
Politics is the art of controlling your environment.
Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.
I think politics is a higher build in life. You know? If you diffuse under normal, common sense of a story, you make it political. If you choose a conventional way for a story, or refuse to use the conventional way, you make it political.
I mean, I went to a church school when I was younger and imbibed a certain amount of religion then but it was really in university that I got interested in religion and politics at the same time. I don't think as if it were one moment of conversion but my spiritual journey really began then.
To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities; that is not to be taken seriously in politics.
My suspension was a long-planned move... and was done to protect would-be convicts in Romanian politics.
Identity politics preaches a splintering of one large, collaborative group into competing vindictive ones - resulting in new, angry tribes whose central thesis is to not cooperate.
Competition, by itself, always leads to cheating by the powerful, who try to establish pyramids of power, like feudalism. Yet, competition is the great creative force! So how do we save it from its own contradictions? By cooperation! By cooperating with each other, via politics, to make rules and prevent cheating, so that competition can thrive!
I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before.
The corporate sector in my view is the most important since it is actively involved in the shaping of our life on the planet. The corporate world has the power and the means to influence politics and public trends.
I see people like me, who thought someone like me couldn't be in politics, now are saying, 'Oh, wait, I don't need to take money from corporations to run. Maybe I'll run, too.'
Political correctness? In my humor, I never talk about politics. I was never much into all that.
We're very good at talking about the individual in American politics and excellent at talking about the government. But we have little ability to even acknowledge everything that exists in the middle, and given how influential politics is on every other part of our life, I think that failure of discourse is pretty corrosive to our overall culture.
The behaviour of several male politicians against me has never been condemned by Ed Miliband, or the Labour Party, and it needs to be because in the end, it will have a long-term corrosive effect for politics full stop and for young girls who want to go into politics.
We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
