37 Participation Quotes

They don't want you to vote. If they did, we wouldn't vote on a Tuesday. In November. You ever throw a party on a Tuesday? No. Because nobody would come.

Can you appreciate music without playing it? Yes, you can. You can appreciate baseball without playing it. Many people attend a football game merely for the crowd, the excitement, the color.

For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not.

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.

But men must know that in this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

Use what talent you possess - the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.

... All these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.

The ultimate most holy form of theory is action. Not to look on passively while the spark leaps from generation to generation, but to leap and to burn with it!

...I don't feel that they deserve a blanket condemnation at all. There are many things to object to in any society. But take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable. [...] There are even better examples than China. But I do think that China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

Just as the unleashing of ideas and myths in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cleared the way for endless changes in state and social structures, so the subsequent pinning down and splitting up of language into feudal states has now made it impossible for the citizen to participate seriously in society. The inviting humanist irony of the early days has given way to the off-putting rational cynicism and sloganeering of our time.

The young men had to hold debates as part of their work in rhetoric, and the young women were required to be present, for an hour and a half every week, in order to hlep form an audience for the boys, but were not allowed to take part.

I believe that Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence for fighting for our cause, but by non-participation of anything you believe is evil.

Le combat cessa faute de combattants.

Half of democracy is about just showing up.

Iranian women have a larger part than men in this Movement and Revolution.

Any government is free to the people under it where the laws rule and the people are a party to the laws.

Withdrawal or non-participation is an option open to idealists and cynics. We live in an imperfect world and our politicians are no exception. No one is, but we owe it to our country and ourselves to deal with circumstances as they are, not as we would like them to be.

Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.

'I make a conscious decision not to vote as I don't trust anybody that runs the country because you give somebody too much power and they let it go to their heads. Tony Blair is only the front man. He's not necessarily the man that actually pulls the strings'

I think everybody who has a brain should get involved in politics. Working within. Not criticizing it from the outside. Become an active participant, no matter how feeble you think the effort is.

In the final analysis it doesn't really matter what the political system is... We don't need perfect political systems; we need perfect participation.

How many people here have telekinetic powers? Raise my hand.

If one is going to write about war, self respect demands that one.

Do you believe in fairies?...If you believe, clap your hands!

You must get involved to have an impact. No one is impressed with the won-lost record of the referee.

I watched, along with all of you, as the tens of thousands of our people stood patiently in long queues for many hours. Some sleeping on the open ground overnight waiting to cast this momentous vote.

Play the game, but don't believe in it.

Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things...