Your Personal Political Heroes (and their quotes)

[irish_thug]

Here's one of my favorites from Frederick Douglas

The original black comic book character

 

[irish_thug]

I identify as an attack helicopter

Lauren Southern

 

[BKMMAFAN]

Literally cited this quote to open up my law school apps' personal statement:

"A sense of duty pursues us forever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us."

- Daniel Webster​

It reads like poetry but that's just how Webster spoke. Daniel Webster was one of the most highly regarded orators and lawyers of his time (of any time). His time was a crucial one in US history, perhaps the most crucial, when the very nature of the US Supreme Court and Judicial Branch and judicial review (and, by extension, the concepts of separation of powers and checks and balances) were being substantively crafted and established. As a trial attorney, Webster is said to have shaped and had more influence on the Marshall Court than anyone save for Chief Justice Marshall himself. See: McCulloch v. Maryland and Gibbons v. Ogden (Webster litigated 8 of the most commonly studied foundational Con Law cases in US law schools)

As an example of Webster's influence, Marshall's famous "the power to tax is the power to destroy" was actually lifted from Webster's closing arguments in McCulloch:

"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation."​

Webster eventually became referred to as the "Great Expounder of the Constitution" due to his role in the formation of constitutional law

Where are you planning to take the bar (assuming you haven't already)?

I'm debating taking FL next year. Should've taken it right after law school, haha (admitted in OH).

 

[HatchetHarry]

It seems like a lot of...certain posters here are largely reactionary, which doesn't seem to draw from any particular principle or ideology, so I'm curious to see the list of figures from whom posters here draw influence and inspiration.


For me, some that come to mind are:

1. Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Argentinian physician, revolutionary, and poet)

"Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary."​

2. Malcolm X (US theorist and political organizer)

"It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism."​

3. Franklin D. Roosevelt (Greatest President in US history)

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”​

4. Thomas Sankara (Burkinabe revolutionary and political leader)

"The revolution and women's liberation go together. We do not talk of women's emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph. Women hold up the other half of the sky."​

5. Frederick Douglass (US writer, activist, and former slave)

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."​

6. Harriet Tubman (US abolitionist)

"I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other."​

7. Karl Marx (German social scientist and philosopher)

"Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."​

8. W.E.B. Du Bois (US sociologist and activist)

"To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires."​

9. Thurgood Marshall (US Supreme Court Justice and lawyer)

"In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute."​

10. Vladimir Lenin (Russian revolutionary and theorist)

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.​

11. Simone de Beauvoir (French philosopher)

"Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male."​

12. Louise Michel (French revolutionary)

"Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance. If you are not cowards, kill me."​

You continue to cement your legacy as the biggest dullard in the war room. You start with a quote from a murderous fraud. Argentinian physician? He was actually a dropout. You should really read about a person before quoting them.

 

[Trotsky]

You continue to cement your legacy as the biggest dullard in the war room. You start with a quote from a murderous fraud. Argentinian physician? He was actually a dropout. You should really read about a person before quoting them.

You don't know what the fuck you're talking about as usual, or you're trolling with what you know to be false information

He received his medical degree in 1953 through accelerated course loads and provided medical aid all across Latin America.

 

[HatchetHarry]

You don't know what the fuck you're talking about as usual, or you're trolling with what you know to be false information

He received his medical degree in 1953 through accelerated course loads and provided medical aid all across Latin America.

The guy was a murdeorus piece of terrorist shit. I don’t know why you get joy out of this communist sympathizing troll online persona. It’s quite sad actually.

 

[Trotsky]

The guy was a murdeorus piece of terrorist shit. I don’t know why you get joy out of this communist sympathizing troll online persona. It’s quite sad actually.

Just lol at you saying this just because you're annoyed that I and others have earnestly called you out on pretending to be a far right moron on an obscure sports forum because you apparently have nothing better to do, and what an objectively sad pastime that is.

 

[HatchetHarry]

Just lol at you saying this just because you're annoyed that I and others have earnestly called you out on pretending to be a far right moron on an obscure sports forum because you apparently have nothing better to do, and what an objectively sad pastime that is.

User name: Trotsky.

Why don’t you move to Venezuela?

 

[Darth_Inv1ctu5]

All you ever need to know about politics:

"It is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved? It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved." - Machiavelli

Frankly, Machiavelli should be taught in elementary schools as mandatory reading.

But we know it's not in the interest of those with power and money to have an educated and thinking herd - it's easier to control an ignorant mob of drones instead

 

[salamander]

"Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery."
-Malcolm X

"Black man, you are on your own."
-Steven Biko

 

[machidafan99]

You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.

 

[Exception]

“Only in the detached from reality world of goofy Hollywood and modern academia could a mass murderer like Che Guevara be turned into something of a cult celebrity.”

Paul Kengor

This times a million. When you've actually traveled to SA you learn quickly that people despise what that pussy caused. Maybe 1 out of 10 people there that I talked to didn't think he was as bad as Hitler (the 9 out of 10 are right, he was). A murderous piece of shit that stifled the development of SA for decades. If it wasn't for that whiny sociopath the whole continent would be made up of 1st world countries today. Instead, country after country has a breakdown to cesspool-levels like Venezuela today. Just such a shame. What beautiful and resource-rich countries that could have not been 3rd world, so easily.

But hey, 1st worlders who go to college, don't learn an actual thing about him and see him on t-shirts think he's "cool" so let's make sure everyone sees his awesome quotes!

lol. Pathetic.

 

[faustian]

2. Malcolm X (US theorist and political organizer)

"It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism."​

Lol well this is a startlingly dumb quote. So absurd, in fact, that I actually googled to find some context, thinking that perhaps there was more to it. Turns out the context only makes it even more ignorant:

https://books.google.com/books?id=RVdQ0mhiapUC&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq="It's+impossible+for+a+white+person+to+believe+in+capitalism+and+not+believe+in+racism.+You+can't+have+capitalism+without+racism."&source=bl&ots=l3tnISYeSk&sig=f5-2RS8j1W4Z-xG74i6G54o4OGc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjhnbzg3L_ZAhVQ2lMKHZxVCRIQ6AEIOTAC#v=onepage&q="It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism."&f=false

Referring to recently liberated African nations, he explained: "None of them are adopting the capitalist system because they realize they can't. You can't operate a capitalistic system unless you're vulturistic; you have to have someone else's blood to suck to be a capitalist." Postcolonial nations do not have this option. They must either develop along noncapitalist lines or risk being resubordinated to foreign capitalist powers. In response to a question about the kind of social system that would best facilitate African American liberation, Malcolm noted that the current "system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American," adding: "It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism. And if you find one and you happen to get that person into a conversation and they have a philosophy that makes you sure they don't have this racism in their outlook, usually they're socialists or their political philosophy is socialism."
​

I mean, wtf. How do people take this guy seriously on any level. He clearly doesn't know what a "capitalistic system" consists of nor does he seem to understand what capital actually is. Apparently to him, the concept of capital is somehow inextricably tied to race. I suspect he's so far out of his element that he's just lobbing these bombastic claims thinking that people will have to assume he must know what he's talking about in order to make such controversial and provocative assertions. And apparently some people have actually fallen for it

In rebuttal to X's ramblings, I offer up Hernando de Soto Polar, an actual economist and global advocate/activist for the impoverished. A little background on de Soto:

http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/oct04/fpg_desoto101904.html

A finalist for the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, de Soto is the president and founder of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima. The Economist magazine called it one of the two most important think-tanks in the world.

Through the institute, de Soto works with leaders and workers in developing nations and emerging democracies to enact institutional reforms that give the poor access to formal property rights and capital. He meets with heads of state and trudges through the streets and fields to talk with black-market traders, factory workers and sharecroppers in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Founded in 1980, de Soto’s institute is credited for developing legal property systems that have moved hundreds of thousands of businesses and real estate holdings from the underground economy into the economic mainstream, and revolutionized the way world leaders address enduring poverty.

In Peru alone, de Soto oversaw some 400 initiatives, laws and regulations that modernized and stabilized the nation’s economy between 1988 and 1995. His reforms gave property titles to more than 1.2 million families, and brought into the legal system some 380,000 firms that previously operated in the black market.

De Soto has won praise from Margaret Thatcher and Koffi Annan. Bill Clinton called de Soto "the world’s greatest living economist" and Jack Kemp said he deserved to win the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

De Soto’s many honors include The Freedom Prize (Switzerland), The Fisher Prize (United Kingdom), the CARE Humanitarian Award (Canada), and The Goldwater Award, The Templeton Freedom Prize, and The Adam Smith Award from the Association of Private Enterprise Education (USA).

So what does de Soto have to say about capitalism and how to establish and operate a successful capitalistic system?

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (2003) offers some insight:

The cities of the Third World and the former communist countries are teeming with entrepreneurs. . . . The inhabitants of these countries possess talent, enthusiasm, and an astonishing ability to wring a profit out of practically nothing. They can grasp and use modern technology.

But if people in countries making the transition to capitalism are not pitiful beggars, are not helplessly trapped in obsolete ways, and are not uncritical prisoners of dysfunctional cultures, what is it that prevents capitalism from delivering to them the same wealth it has delivered to the West? Why does capitalism thrive only in the West, as if enclosed in a bell jar?

*** I assume at this point Mr X's disciples might have it all figured out with a uniform blanket answer. I'll nonetheless proceed with de Soto's analysis: ***
​

In this book I intend to demonstrate that the the major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labor and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one thing that the poor countries of the world cannot seem to produce for themselves, no matter how eagerly their people engage in all the other activities that characterize a capitalist economy.

*** "You can't operate a capitalistic system unless you're vulturistic; you have to have someone else's blood to suck to be a capitalist." ***
​

Even in the poorest countries, the poor save. . . . But they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital. . . .

. . . In the West, by contrast, every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment, or store of inventories is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational process, assets can lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material existence. . . . By this process, the West injects life into assets and makes them generate capital.

This is the mystery of capital. Solving it requires an understanding of why Westerners, by representing assets with titles, are able to see and draw out capital from them. One of the greatest challenges to the human mind is to comprehend and to gain access to those things we know exist but cannot see. . . . The great practitioners of capitalism were able to reveal and extract capital where others saw only junk by devising new ways to represent the invisible potential that is locked up in the assets we accumulate.

. . . Only the West has the conversion process to transform the invisible to the visible. It is this disparity that explains why Western nations can create capital and the Third World and former communist nations cannot. The absence of this process in poor nations is not the consequence of some Western monopolistic conspiracy. . . . This process was not created from a blueprint and is not described in a glossy brochure. Its origins are obscure and its significance buried in the economic subconscious of Western capitalist nations.

. . . It is not only former communist and Third World countries who have suffered this problem of capital. The same was true of the United States in 1783, when President George Washington complained about "banditti skimming and disposing of the cream of the country at the expense of the many." These "banditti" were squatters and small illegal entrepreneurs occupying lands they did not own. For the next hundred years, such squatters battled for legal rights to their land and miners warred over their claims because ownership laws differed from town to town and camp to camp. Enforcing property rights created such a quagmire of social unrest and antagonism throughout a young United States that Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Joseph Story wondered in 1820 whether lawyers would ever be able to settle them.

. . . That past is many nations' present. The Western nations have so successfully integrated their poor into their economies that they have lost even the memory of how it was done, how the creation of capital began back when, as the American historian Gordon Wood has written "something momentous was happening in the society and culture that released the aspirations and energies of common people as never before in American history." The "something momentous" was that Americans and Europeans were on the verge of establishing widespread formal property law and inventing the conversion process in that law which allowed them to create capital.
​

So a unified coherent system of formally recognizing and recording property ownership, backed by the development of property law to protect ownership rights, allows for the fixing of assets and conversion to capital. But apparently this system of capital creation is racist because it requires sucking blood and somehow precludes blacks

 

[faustian]

Where are you planning to take the bar (assuming you haven't already)?

I'm debating taking FL next year. Should've taken it right after law school, haha (admitted in OH).

It'll be in Florida. I'm more concerned about the character and fitness investigation than the actual exam lol

 

[mixcontactsport]

I have no political heroes, but I do stand by some of the quotes that George Carlin say, i.e. my sig.

 

[Philo-Publius]

2. Malcolm X (US theorist and political organizer)

"It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism."​

So, what then happens in a capitalist society that is absent of white people? Is it still "racist?"

Usually, I wouldn't care about mindless shit like this. But, admittedly, because it concerns my personal hero, is in direct opposition to my trying to foster open and non-moronic personal discussion, and reflects an incredible lack of historical knowledge, it does rustle me fairly well.

If Che is a "mass murderer," then so is George Washington, every valiant soldier, and every military figure that you most likely moronically admire. Except Che gave up a comfortable and rich life, and then passed up fame and fortune, to devote himself to helping the poor and needy break their chains. His virtuous actions were completely voluntary.

Military leaders kill people. Revolutionaries kill people. Changers of the world kill people. Yet they are judged not by their intentions, not even by their effects, but by how fucking stupid their appraisers are.

There is absolutely no comparison between George Washington and Che Guevara. You have completely failed at fostering "non-moronic" personal discussion if that was your goal. Che was not just a revolutionary, but a brutal murderer that had people executed without trial simply because they disagreed with him politically.

 

[faustian]

Going beyond politicians now, just some of my favorite speakers/writers ever:

“Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”
- Viktor Frankl

“What is to give light must endure burning.”
- Viktor Frankl

“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”
- Viktor Frankl

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Man is a creature who can get used to anything."
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"To love someone means to see him as God intended him."
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”
- Thomas Paine

“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
- Thomas Paine

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
-Plato

 

[Bamboozled]

 

[dragonsfly]

“A boy without mischief is like a bowling ball without a liquid centre.” Credit to @HomerThompson

 

[Prefect]