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Quotes

I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792

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

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

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811

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

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

—Mao Zedong, 1938

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

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

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

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

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

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.

—Aristophanes, c. 424 BC

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

—Paul Valéry, 1943

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967