Archive

Quotes

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

—Frederick the Great, c. 1770

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

—E.B. White, 1944

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

—Al Smith, 1933

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

—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850

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, 1855

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

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

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

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811