Archive

Quotes

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

—George Borrow, 1843

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

—E.B. White, 1944

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

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

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

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

—Mao Zedong, 1938

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

—Catherine the Great, c. 1796

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

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

—Anacharsis, c. 550 BC

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

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

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

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

—Paul Valéry, 1943