You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
—Aristophanes, c. 424 BCQuotes
The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.
—Herodotus, c. 425 BCWhat 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, 1830Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong, 1938Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
—Vegetius, c. 385Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry, 1943What, 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, 1855Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.
—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—Lord Acton, 1887Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.
—John Wilkes Booth, 1865I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.
—Laozi, c. 500 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 BC