Archive

Quotes

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

—Mao Zedong, 1938

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

—Dean Acheson, 1970

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

What, 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, 1855

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 more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

—Tacitus, c. 117

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

—Al Smith, 1933

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

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

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

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

—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865

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

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917