Archive

Quotes

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

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

—Che Guevara, 1968

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

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

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

—Al Smith, 1933

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

—Hannah Arendt, 1958

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

—Tacitus, c. 117

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

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

—Quintus Fabius Maximus, c. 203 BC

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

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

—George Borrow, 1843