Archive

Quotes

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

—Dean Acheson, 1970

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

—Che Guevara, 1968

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

—Robert Byrd, 2005

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

—George Borrow, 1843

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

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

—Laozi, c. 500 BC

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

—Hannah Arendt, 1958

Politics is the art of the possible.

—Otto von Bismarck, 1867

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant, 1784