I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.
—H. Rap Brown, 1967Quotes
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, 1787The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.
—Dean Acheson, 1970The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.
—John Nance Garner, c. 1967The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1787Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—Lord Acton, 1887Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.
—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830Written 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 BCTelevision has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917Whether 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