Archive

Quotes

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

—Anacharsis, c. 550 BC

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

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

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995