Archive

Quotes

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

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

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

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865

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

—Aristophanes, c. 424 BC

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1787

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, 1830

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

—George Borrow, 1843

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

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

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

—E.B. White, 1944

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1944

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830