Archive

Quotes

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811

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

—Anthony Burgess, 1972

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

—H. Rap Brown, 1967

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

Whether 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, 2001

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

—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

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

—Robert Byrd, 2005

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

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

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580