Archive

Quotes

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

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

—Horace, c. 8 BC

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

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

—Anthony Burgess, 1972

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774

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

—Dean Acheson, 1970

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

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

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

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

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

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811

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

—Robert Byrd, 2005

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

—Paul Valéry, 1943