Archive

Quotes

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

—Dean Acheson, 1970

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

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

A 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, 2000

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

—Paul Valéry, 1943

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

—Anthony Burgess, 1972

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

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

—Mao Zedong, 1938

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930