76 Representation Quotes

We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.

In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.

The rich, the well-born, and the able, acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives. The most illustrious of them must, therefore, be separated from the mass, and placed by themselves in a senate; this is, to all honest and useful intents, an ostracism.

There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state, the majesty of the people, call it what you will - a doge, an avoyer, an archon, a president, a consul, a syndic; this becomes at once an object of ambition and dispute, and, in time, of division, faction, sedition, and rebellion.

America may not realize it yet, but Latin prototypes are being created right now, and not just by me. They are these mambo kings and salsa queens, Aztec lords and Inca princesses, every Hernandez and Fernandez, whom this country will one day come to understand and respect.

There were no Latin people on 'Star Trek,' that this was proof that they weren't planning to have us around for the future.

Whether you agree with me, disagree with me, like me or loathe me, don't bind my hands when I am negotiating on behalf of the British people.

In movies, I hope women aren't always portrayed as sex symbols. People like Drew Barrymore are paving the way for girls my age. Hopefully I can pave the way for young actresses, too.

For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

The only thing that was sort of Asian [as a role model] was Hello Kitty. I don't want to model myself after Hello Kitty. She has no mouth.

[An article about Cho] started out, 'Funny, sexy, zaftig Margaret Cho...' What is 'zaftig?' Isn't that German for 'big fat pig?' I guess I was lucky; 'zaftig' is kind of a nice word. It could have been, 'Funny, sexy, OBESE Margaret Cho.'

Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they're being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.

If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how it is with representation.

Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone (Michael Moore) who actually embodies all of those qualities.

Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

Friends, we have now won. ...I say to Aymaras, Quechuas, Chiquitaos, and Guaranis: for the first time we [indigenous people] are going to be presidents. And I want to say to businesses, intellectual professionals, and artists: do not abandon us.

If democracy is ever to be threatened, it will not be by revolutionary groups burning government offices and occupying the broadcasting and newspaper offices of the world. It will come from disenchantment, cynicism and despair caused by the realization that the New World Order means we are all to be managed and not represented.

Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests

I am not gonna die because I failed as someone else. I am gonna succeed as myself. And I'm gonna stay here and rock the mike until the next Korean-American, fag hag, shit starter, girl comic, trash talker, comes up and takes my place!

You either do it quietly and describe the Indian community in half a dozen poems or you think sod it, and go all out. The most Indian way I could think of was to do monologues and voices. [1]

I get offered so many bad movies. And they're all raging queens or transvestites or Martians.

I can't mention, I'm sorry to say, any Arab leader... Where is the... Nasser? Where is the Arab leader who will stand up and tell these people the truth? This is what we are waiting for.

President Bush would leave the Supreme Court looking less like America and more like an old boys club.

To the delight of millions of little children, the Santa in New York's great parade will be half of a same-sex couple. And guess who the other half will be? Me! Harvey Fierstein, nice Jewish boy from Bensonhurst, dressed in holiday finery portraying the one and only Mrs. Claus.

I can't make her younger, taller, or change her gender. I can't do anything other than to tell you who she is.

Today, when every form of perversion except masturbation and bestiality have been shown on the screen, Hellman, Wyler and the Mirisch Co. apparently thought a re-do of The Children's Hour would sell tickets if lesbianism were not only restored as the charge the evil child falsely brings, but also condoned... There is an explicit line of dialogue which asserts that those who choose to practice lesbianism are not destroyed by it - a claim disapproved by the number of lesbians who become insane and/or commit suicide.

[Jo from The Facts of Life] was such a lesbian. Wasn't she the biggest lesbian? I used to watch that show, like, 'Oh, she gonna fuck Blair!'

The electors see their representative not only as a legislator for the state but also as the natural protector of local interests in the legislature; indeed, they almost seem to think that he has a power of attorney to represent each constituent, and they trust him to be as eager in their private interests as in those of the country.

And then I come to find out after that film, that all the lesbian sex scenes : let me repeat that. All the lesbian sex scenes : were cut out of that film because the test audience was turned off by them. Boy, is my thumb not on the pulse of America. I don't want to seem like Randy Pan, the Goat Boy, but that was the only reason I went to that piece of shit. If I had been in that test audience, the only one out front protesting that film would have been Michael Douglas, demanding his part be put back in, all right. 'I swear I was in that movie. I swear I was!' 'Gee, Mike. The movie started. Sharon Stone was eating another woman for an hour and a half. Then the credits rolled. I don't remember seeing your scrawny ass, Mike.' 'Was Bill Hicks in that test audience?'

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

In this great nation there is but one order, that of the people, whose power, by a peculiarly happy improvement of the representative principle, is transferred from them, without impairing in the slightest degree their sovereignty, to bodies of their own creation, and to persons elected by themselves, in the full extent necessary for the purposes of free, enlightened, and efficient government.

If we are not represented, we are slaves.

Taxation without representation is tyranny.

On a toujours cherche des explications quand c'etait des representations qu'on pouvait seulement essaye d'inventer.

Well, you're going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking.

The most distinguishing feature, or, at least, one of the most distinguishing features, of the great change effected in 1832 was that those who effected it at once abolished all the franchises as ancient as those of the Baronage of England; and, while they abolished them, they offered and proposed no substitute. The discontent upon the subject of representation which afterwards more or less pervaded our society dates from that period, and that discontent, all will admit, has ceased. It was terminated by the Act of Parliamentary Reform of 1867-8. That act was founded on a confidence that the great body of the people of this country were 'Conservative'. I use the word in its purest and loftiest sense. I mean that the people of England, and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness-that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, the empire of England-that they believe, on the whole, that the greatness and the empire of England are to be attributed to the ancient institutions of this country...There are people who may be, or who at least affect to be, working men, and who, no doubt, have a certain influence with a certain portion of the metropolitan working class, who talk Jacobinism...I say with confidence that the great body of the working class of England utterly repudiate such sentiments. They have no sympathy with them. They are English to the core. They repudiate cosmopolitan principles. They adhere to national principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the kingdom and the empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our Sovereign and members of such an Empire. Well, then, as regards the political institutions of this country, the maintenance of which is one of the chief tenets of the Tory party, so far as I can read public opinion, the feeling of the nation is in accordance with the Tory party.

Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio there is a young gay person who all the sudden realizes that he or she is gay; knows that if their parents find out they will be tossed out of the house, their classmates will taunt the child, and the Anita Bryant's and John Briggs' are doing their part on TV. And that child has several options: staying in the closet, and suicide. And then one day that child might open the paper that says 'Homosexual elected in San Francisco' and there are two new options: the option is to go to California, or stay in San Antonio and fight. Two days after I was elected I got a phone call and the voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania. And the person said 'Thanks'. And you've got to elect gay people, so that thousand upon thousands like that child know that there is hope for a better world; there is hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope, not only gays, but those who are blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us's: without hope the us's give up. I know that you can't live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you, and you have got to give them hope.

There are men in the House of Commons who profess in a special sense to be the representatives of labour, who would not allow me, who represented a great working class constituency...the claim to represent you. In order to do that, according to their theories, I should have to be a man who did some work thirty years ago, and never did any after...it is these men who are at this time blackening the character of those who are upholding the British dominions and the British flag throughout the world...They have no word of sympathy for the men who suffer for the Imperial cause...But one thing I will say, and I say it in your name: these men do not represent the working classes of England, and never yet in our history of the British race, has the great democracy been unpatriotic.