A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000Quotes
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1944Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867Every country has the government it deserves.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1811Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.
—John Wilkes Booth, 1865I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!
—George H. W. Bush, 1990You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
—Mario Cuomo, 1985The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.
—Che Guevara, 1968The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
—Anthony Burgess, 1972The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1787People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.
—Robert Byrd, 2005It 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