Archive

Quotes

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

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

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

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

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

—H.L. Mencken, 1921

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

—George Borrow, 1843

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

—Al Smith, 1933

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

—Magna Carta, 1215

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

—Dean Acheson, 1970

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1787