Populist Quotes

1. "I come from a working class community in eastern Scotland, and I've always been a populist, though not a patronising populist."
Author: Brian Cox

2. "I'm anti-big power. I don't know if that's populist or not."
Author: Brian Lamb

3. "The cable news channels have cleverly seized on the creed of objectivity and redefined it in populist terms. They attack news based on verifiable fact for its liberal bias, for, in essence, failing to be objective, and promise a return to "genuine" objectivity."
Author: Chris Hedges

4. "Bill Clinton sitting on Air Force One getting his hair cut while people around the country cooled their heels and waited for him, became a metaphor for a populist president who had gotten drunk with the perks of his own power and was sort of, you know, not sensitive to what people wanted."
Author: Dee Dee Myers

5. "I don't know if I'm a populist artist, but I do try to maintain a spirit of generosity."
Author: Fred Tomaselli

6. "Obama supporters pretended that his 2008 campaign was some sort of populist uprising even as Wall Street overwhelmingly supported his candidacy."
Author: Glenn Greenwald

7. "If you can't be a populist in Arkansas, you ain't going to be a populist in Washington."
Author: Jim Hightower

8. "What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays' Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us."
Author: Jim Hightower

9. "In these troubled times we live in, we should remain vigilant and see through populist arguments."
Author: King Albert II

10. "The crisis of the 1930s and the populist reactions of that time must not be forgotten."
Author: King Albert II

11. "Extremists and populist movements are exploiting people's fear of those who are not like us. We can see the consequences in the form of terrorism and racially motivated violence."
Author: Kjell Magne Bondevik

12. "Class warfare or soaking the so-called rich may make for good populist demagoguery and serve the political ends of the governing masterminds, but it does nothing to solve the grave realities of the federal government's insatiable appetite for spending and its inability to reform itself."
Author: Mark R. Levin

13. "My personal political convictions are rooted in the populist political traditions of western Canada."
Author: Preston Manning

14. "In those moments of moving through the streets with people who share one's beliefs comes the rare and magical possibility of a kind of populist communion...At such times it is as though the still small pool of one's own identity has been overrun by a great flood, bringing its own grand collective desires and resentments, scouring out that pool so thoroughly that one no longer feels fear or sees the reflections of oneself but is carried along on that insurrectionary surge. These moments when individuals find others who share their dreams, when fear is overwhelmed by idealism or by outrage, when people feel a strength that surprises them, are moments in which they become heroes—for what are heroes but those so motivated by ideals that fear cannot sway them, those who speak for us, those who have power for good? A person who never feels it is condemned to cynicism and isolation. In those moments everyone becomes a visionary, everyone becomes a hero."
Author: Rebecca Solnit

15. "Although distortion of the past is widespread, the most common travesty is one of omission, wherein populist leaders neglect to mention the crimes committed by their own side or recollect them in such a way that evades accepting full responsibility. That politicians are so able to evoke historical arguments in these ways results from a prior failure of the society to engage in a full and frank encounter with past wrongdoings."
Author: Richard Ashby Wilson

16. "Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, 'I just want to be entertained.' This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means that we shouldn't go to movies together."
Author: Richard Russo

17. "Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in 'Veep.' She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play 'Veep' would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn't one."
Author: Rob Sheffield

18. "Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."
Author: Robert A. Heinlein

19. "As morally troubling and politically charged as the issue of inequality has become, it's not likely to cause a populist revolt. Most Americans still have a generally positive view of the wealthy and, rightly or wrongly, believe they too can make it to Richistan someday."
Author: Robert Frank

20. "The club is not a business. It's a populist democracy."
Author: Simon Kuper

21. "For decades, Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting.... The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leawoof toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. 'We are here,' they scream, 'to cut your taxes."
Author: Thomas Frank

22. "It's innate in me to be a Democrat - a true Southern populist kind of Democrat. There's not a lot of those anymore. I'm not saying I'm right or wrong. That's just the way I feel."
Author: Tim McGraw

23. "Nobody is entirely satisfied with the condition in which he or she lives: we often have the impression that these conditions are getting worse. Whose fault is this? It is tempting to seek a simple answer and an easily identifiable guilty person or group: it is this temptation that produces populist movements and parties."
Author: Tzvetan Todorov

24. "These various remedies, eugenic, educational, ethical, populist and socialist, all assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress towards such an ideal. I think [democracy] is a false ideal."
Author: Walter Lippmann

25. "When the Populist congressman "Sockless" Simpson of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, misspelled his hometown while running for office, he said, "I wouldn't give a tinker's durn for a man who can't spell a word more than one way."
Author: William Least Heat Moon

Populist Quotes Pictures