Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
—Alexander Hamilton, 1787Quotes
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.
—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
—Magna Carta, 1215I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.
—Catherine the Great, c. 1796Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!
—George H. W. Bush, 1990You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
—Mario Cuomo, 1985If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.
—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330Written 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 BCSic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.
—John Wilkes Booth, 1865The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.
—Herodotus, c. 425 BCPolitics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry, 1943Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944