Political Activists

"Ever since Comte first set the agenda of social science, his megalomania lingers on in sociology, political science, and other disciplines."

"Thomas Flanagan: Well I'm feeling pretty manly today..."

"I want to illustrate the concept of a solution in mixed strategies with a concrete example using real-world data, but I have not been able to find an appropriate one from Canadian politics."

"Well I think Assange should be assassinated actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something. There's no good coming of this..."

"But if politics is an art, it is not like sculpture or painting, where one side acts and the other is passive material. It is more like drama without a script, or dance without choreography - in other words, improvisation. Either player may surprise us again with a new move."

"Evan Solomon: Just for the record that's pretty harsh stuff.."

"For the foreseeable future, Canada will have to be functionally bimetric, as well as a bilingual, country."

"The problem is that we are living now with the consequences of the others people mistake. It would be nice to make our own and learn from them. That is the art of democracy. That is the art of citizenship."

"When you introduce markets in food, then you introduce two very simple rules. The first rule is this: if you have money you can get the food from wherever around the world. The other rule markets impose is this: if you do not have money, you will starve. This is an important point … The reason why people starve is because of poverty … not because of a shortage of food … but because the only way to access the food is through the market."

"The question is: why are there markets of food at all?"

"We are all familiar with the idea: Give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and you'll feed him for a lifetime. That sounds reasonable enough. … But think of the model that rests on. It constructs people in developing countries that sort of people sitting by the rivers and eating fish and then they look at the river and said: "- So what's that? - It looks like a fish. - Well, how do we get it out? - Well I have no idea, we would have to wait for white man to come and tell us." It's important to remember that actually there are systems of governance that already exist. There are models of development that already exist in developing countries that actually are much more sustainable than the model of free markets that we have been trying to export."

"The opposite of consumption isn't thrift. It's generosity."

"Generosity makes us happiest. We'll be happier people when we share, not when we impose, but when we learn from one another. Because when I'm connected to everyone I disappear … in being excellent you lose yourself. And when you're connected to everyone, that's the best thing that can happen."

"We are not the consumers of democracy, we are its proprietors."

"It's our duty to honor the dead by bringing democracy to this country."

"We cannot resist against these savages anymore. Please listen to me! Brothers and sisters, I will use the word beg. I beg you. We have to end this for now."

"[History]... is nothing else but the rise and disappearance of races."

"...immigration today is a racial issue. It is one which sees masses of non-whites from around the globe immigrating to white countries."

"There are four ways through which a nation's population can vanish: 1. Through obliteration in war; 2. Through their lands being swamped by labor-driven immigration; 3. Through physical mixing with newcomers; and 4. The second and third factors above combined with a decreasing birth rate amongst the original population. Ancient Rome vanished because of the last three factors: now exactly the same scenario is being played out in Western Europe, North America and Australia. Unless checked, the demographic trends show conclusively that Whites will be a minority in all three of these continents by the year 2100. After that, it is only then a question of time and Whites as a racial group will vanish completely."

"Unless legal and illegal immigration is halted and reversed, European First World nations across all of Europe from Spain to Russia, North America, Australia and New Zealand — will be destroyed and have their very culture and civilisation changed to that of the Third World. Immigration is now the single most important issue facing all First World nations, and will determine whether Western Civilisation continues to exist or not."

"It is said, in fact, that the definition of a white South African is “someone who would rather be murdered in their bed than make it.”"

"Apartheid was based on a fallacy: the fallacy that nonwhites could be used as labor to drive society; that nonwhites could physically form a majority inside South Africa, but that they could not determine the nature of South African society."

"Afrikaners: The time for white supremacism is gone. You cannot hope to survive while you are so intrinsically entwined with black labour. You used them for everything, even to murdering you and then digging your grave. You cannot survive while every single thing you do, every enterprise, every interaction, every aspect of your lives, is determined by your reliance on black labour. Because, whether you like it or not, black people also have rights, and they have claimed them. You cannot think that you have a right to rule over black people — you do not."

"Somehow, white South Africans believed that black labor was like a lawn mower: you could have it around, and when you didn’t need it, you could hide it in its little shed where it would be good and quiet-until you needed it again."

"Those people who occupy a territory determine the nature of the society in that region."

"apartheid–to which Afrikaners clung for decades as their only hope and salvation from Third World domination–was in fact an impracticable and unworkable system which led directly to the Afrikaners’ demise as a political force in that country."

"We are here to announce class warfare, in peace and for democracy."

"They have never felt pain … We don’t have their connections, but we’re ready to die."

"If we want to stay really human beings, we must get up and call the Zionists what they are: Nazi criminals. The hate of the Jews by the Germans was less deeply rooted than the hate of the Palestinians by the Israeli Jews. The brainwashing of the Jewish Israeli populations is going on for over sixty years. They cannot see a Palestinian as a human being."

"Formerly an anti-Semite was somebody who hated Jews because they were Jews and had a Jewish soul. But nowadays an anti-Semite is somebody who is hated by Jews."

"Auschwitz existed within history, not outside of it. The main lesson I learned there is simple: We Jews should never, ever become like our tormentors ...Since 1967 it has become obvious that political Zionism has one monolithic aim: Maximum land in Palestine with a minimum of Palestinians on it. This aim is pursued with an inexcusable cruelty as demonstrated during the assault on Gaza. The cruelty is explicitly formulated in the Dahiye doctrine of the military and morally supported by the Holocaust religion.I am pained by the parallels I observe between my experiences in Germany prior to 1939 and those suffered by Palestinians today. I cannot help but hear echoes of the Nazi mythos of "blood and soil" in the rhetoric of settler fundamentalism which claims a sacred right to all the lands of biblical Judea and Samaria. The various forms of collective punishment visited upon the Palestinian people — coerced ghettoization behind a "security wall"; the bulldozing of homes and destruction of fields; the bombing of schools, mosques, and government buildings; an economic blockade that deprives people of the water, food, medicine, education and the basic necessities for dignified survival — force me to recall the deprivations and humiliations that I experienced in my youth. This century-long process of oppression means unimaginable suffering for Palestinians."

"You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims."

"I, for one, am certainly going to continue to raise a little hell."

"I may have lost the election but I have not lost my reason to live."

"Democracy is not something we have, it's something we do."

"Our country is supposed to be of the people, by the people and for the people, and if that's not worth fighting for I don't know what is."

"I want to plant a few more seeds here and there before they plant me."

"I've been to Sarajevo a few times and have got to know a lot of people there who put on plays during the siege. I wanted to share in that because I knew it was important to them . . . I began to see something of what was going on there in terms of actually keeping up people's spirit to resist - the resistance that causes change - even in the worst imaginable circumstances. And I realized that it paralleled the same spirit that existed during the Holocaust and in the gulag. Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living. That experience changed me, because I realized that if, as actors or writers or directors or designers, we can keep the will to resist alive in as many people as possible, then that's what we are about, and that's what we can do. It's more and more important because of the terrible things that are happening in our cities and the political and economic agendas that various governments have."

"As a mother you have got to have a view for now and a view for the future."

"I've come to see through the course of my life that people understand what I've tried to do, however inadequately I do it. I've just found people have come to understand me and be glad that I tried to do what I tried to do. And I do feel very inadequate about it, but I feel I must try . . . I think that any citizen can understand that you must raise your voice and do the best you can to speak out. CNN Larry King Live (June 18, 2005)."

"It is... not true... that he proved and used the simplicity of s. He did not need to: he was much cleverer than that; his treatment of solubility of equations is... simpler and more elegant than... textbook tradition."

"He was still a mere boy, yet within these short years he had accomplished enough to prove indubitably that he was one of the greatest mathematicians of all times."

"Since my mathematical youth, I have been under the spell of the classical theory of Galois. This charm has forced me to return to it again and again."

"[T]he soul of Galois will burn on throughout the ages and be a perpetual flame of inspiration."

"An excessive desire for conciseness was the cause of this fault which one must try to avoid when writing on the mysterious abstractions of pure Algebra. Clarity is indeed an absolute necessity. ... Galois too often neglected this precept."

"It is perhaps less well known that [Galois] had also, without any possible doubt, discovered the essentials of the theory of abelian integrals, as Riemann would develop it 25 years later. By what route did he arrive at these conclusions? The fragments of calculations in Analysis found among his papers do not seem to permit much of an answer to that question, but there is room to imagine that he must have been very close to the idea of the Riemann surface associated with an algebraic function, and that such an idea must also be fundamental in his investigations into what he calls the "théorie de l'ambiguïté"."

"No existence could be more tragic... and the only one at all comparable... is.. that of... Niels Henrik Abel, who died of consumption at twenty-six in 1829... just when Galois was ready to take the torch from his hand and to run... further. Abel had the inestimable privilege of living six years longer... full years at the time that genius was ripe... of divine inspiration. What would not Galois have given us, if he had been granted six more such years at the climax of his life."

"Langlands and Grothendieck are both (at least) Giants by any measure, and both were consciously successors of Galois."

"Nous avons transcrit textuellement la démonstration que nous avons donnée de ce lemme dans un mémoire présenté en 1830. Nous y joignons 154 IV The First Memoir comme document historique le note suivante qu’a cru ^devoir^ y apposer M. Poisson. On jugera. Note de l’auteur [We have faithfully transcribed the proof of this lemma that we have given in a memoir presented in 1830. We append as a historical document the following note which Mr Poisson believed he should add. Posterity will judge. Note by the author]"

"[In the first case, the problem is solving equations, including solving an algebraic equation with an unknown variable. In the second case, the problem is integrating differential equations. Galois was the first to recognize with absolute clarity how extraordinarily important the concepts of substitution group and invariant of a discontinuous group are for dealing with problems of the first kind.] Im ersten Falle hat man das Problem der Auflösung der Gleichungen, unter Anderm der Auflösung einer algebraischen Gleichung mit einer Unbekanuten. Im zweiten Falle hat man das Problem der Integration von Differentialgleichungen. Galois war der erste, der vollkommen klar erkannte, wie ausserordentlich wichtig die Begriffe Substiutionengruppe und Invariante einer discontinuirlichen Gruppe für die Behandlung von Problemen jener ersten Art sind."