There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.
—Walter Bagehot, 1863Quotes
You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882What 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, 1830The 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, 1774No 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, 1215O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.
—Horace, c. 8 BCThe whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
—H.L. Mencken, 1921Why 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, 1787Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong, 1938Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.
—Charles de Gaulle, 1963Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry, 1943I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.
—H. Rap Brown, 1967Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784