The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
—Anthony Burgess, 1972Quotes
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.
—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867Written 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 BCWhat, 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, 1855What 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, 1787Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.
—Arthur Miller, 2001A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1944The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.
—John Nance Garner, c. 1967