Archive

Quotes

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

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

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

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

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

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

—E.B. White, 1944

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

—Laozi

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

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

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

—Che Guevara, 1968

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

—Tacitus, c. 117

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

—David Foster Wallace, 2000