Archive

Quotes

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

—Laozi, c. 500 BC

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

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

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

—Mao Zedong, 1938

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

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

—Hannah Arendt, 1958

Politics is the art of the possible.

—Otto von Bismarck, 1867

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

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

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

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882