Archive

Quotes

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850

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

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

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

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

—Horace, c. 8 BC

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774

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

—E.B. White, 1944

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005

Politics is the art of the possible.

—Otto von Bismarck, 1867

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515

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

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

—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865