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Quotes

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

—Horace, c. 8 BC

No 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, 1215

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

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

—Catherine the Great, c. 1796

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850

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

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

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

—Frederick the Great, c. 1770

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

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

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

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

—E.B. White, 1944

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

—George Borrow, 1843