Archive

Quotes

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

—Che Guevara, 1968

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

—Anacharsis, c. 550 BC

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

—H. Rap Brown, 1967

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

—Herodotus, c. 425 BC

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

—Magna Carta, 1215

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

—Arthur Miller, 2001

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985