Archive

Quotes

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

—Arthur Miller, 2001

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

—Paul Valéry, 1943

Politics is the art of the possible.

—Otto von Bismarck, 1867

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

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

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

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

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

—Che Guevara, 1968

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865