Archive

Quotes

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

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

—Laozi

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

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

—Mao Zedong, 1938

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

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

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

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

—Laozi, c. 500 BC

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.

—Aristophanes, c. 424 BC

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

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

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