Archive

Quotes

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

—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

—Catherine the Great, c. 1796

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

—Anthony Burgess, 1972

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811

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

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

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

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1787

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005

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

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

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

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

—H.L. Mencken, 1921

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant, 1784