The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.
—John Nance Garner, c. 1967Quotes
The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.
—Herodotus, c. 425 BCWritten 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 BCWhat, 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, 1855Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—Lord Acton, 1887I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
—Vegetius, c. 385You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.
—Quintus Fabius Maximus, c. 203 BCThe affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774It 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. 1515He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.
—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944