Archive

Quotes

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

Politics is the art of the possible.

—Otto von Bismarck, 1867

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

—Frederick the Great, c. 1770

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

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

—Che Guevara, 1968

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

—H.L. Mencken, 1921

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

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

—Mao Zedong, 1938

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

—Laozi, c. 500 BC

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882