A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1944Quotes
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, 1830Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
—Alexander Hamilton, 1787You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
—Mario Cuomo, 1985I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917A 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, 2000No 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, 1215The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1908Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—Lord Acton, 1887The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.
—Dean Acheson, 1970In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 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, 1855Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.
—Laozi, c. 500 BC