Archive

Quotes

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

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

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

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

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

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

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

—Tacitus, c. 117

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

—Paul Valéry, 1943

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

—Al Smith, 1933

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

—Herodotus, c. 425 BC

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

—George Borrow, 1843