What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855Quotes
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1944Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.
—Robert Byrd, 2005No 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, 1215In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867Every country has the government it deserves.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1811Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.
—Horace, c. 8 BCYou should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882No 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, 1958I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.
—H. Rap Brown, 1967