What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830Quotes
The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.
—John Nance Garner, c. 1967It 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. 1515The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944What, 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, 1855To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.
—Quintus Fabius Maximus, c. 203 BCTreaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.
—Charles de Gaulle, 1963The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1908I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.
—Horace, c. 8 BCWhether 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, 2001Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—Lord Acton, 1887