The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.
—Judge Learned Hand, 1944Quotes
Envy is the basis of democracy.
—Bertrand Russell, 1930O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.
—Horace, c. 8 BCA real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.
—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
—Vegetius, c. 385What 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, 1830What, 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, 1855Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.
—LaoziDo that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.
—Laozi, c. 500 BCI am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.
—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865