A Quote by Don Aitkin

Whatever politicians, activists and manipulators propose, it is the phlegmatic, indifferent, ingrained electorate which disposes. — © Don Aitkin
Whatever politicians, activists and manipulators propose, it is the phlegmatic, indifferent, ingrained electorate which disposes.
Deliver me from your cold phlegmatic preachers, politicians, friends, lovers and husbands.
I understand Twitter has become popular among politicians. This technology allows them to stay in perpetual contact with their constituents. The electorate now has instant information about what politicians have been up to.
I think that compared to other politicians who have been put in jail in the past, compared to the human-rights activists in history who have had to face political prosecution, the activists in Hong Kong nowadays are already quite lucky compared to that.
A President and his wise men can only propose; but Congress disposes. It is when President and Congress agree that American history marches forward.
Political activists of all stripes are usually a wacky bunch, and never more so than in a system like Britain's, where power is effected via the quiescence of the electorate as much as its convictions.
When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not fall in meekly behind them. We who protest...are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress.
During the summer of 2009, conservative activists turned up the heat on Democratic politicians to protest the innovation-destroying, liberty-usurping Obamacare mandate. In the summer of 2012, it's squishy Republican politicians who deserve the grassroots flames.
In a sermon entitled “God's Providence,” C. H. Spurgeon said, “Napoleon once heard it said, that man proposes and God disposes. 'Ah,' said Napoleon, 'but I propose and dispose too.' How do you think he proposed and disposed? He proposed to go and take Russia; he proposed to make all Europe his. He proposed to destroy that power, and how did he come back again? How had he disposed it? He came back solitary and alone, his mighty army perished and wasted, having well-nigh eaten and devoured one another through hunger. Man proposes and God disposes.
The weakness in a model in which one assumes that the electorate gets what it needs from Bill Clinton is that our system doesn't institutionalize the oppositional voice, and one needs to be able to hear the exchange of the debate in order to create an informed electorate.
I don't believe we shall ever again have any form of society in which men will be free. One should not hope for it. One should not hope for anything. Hope is invented by politicians to keep the electorate happy.
Politicians aren't leading us. Nurses are. Doctors are. Teachers are. Activists are.
When Western politicians propose blanket discrimination against Islam, they bolster the terrorists' propaganda.
In order to understand life it is not only necessary not to be indifferent to men, but not to be indifferent to flocks, to trees. One should be indifferent to nothing.
I propose to construct a new chart for navigating, on which I shall delineate all the sea and lands of the Ocean in their proper positions under their bearings; and further, I propose to prepare a book, and to put down all as it were in a picture, by latitude from the equator, and western longitude.
The fact is that in England so many of our politicians are career politicians - they've always been politicians since they left their education. And in the old days of course politicians used to be fish mongers or doctors or whatever. They'd lived life. These days, power seems to go to the hands of people that that's all they've done. And I'm not sure that's a good thing, because it does remove them from the realities of life.
Without an informed electorate, politicians will continue to use the bottom billion merely for photo opportunities, rather than promoting real transformation.
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