Archive

Quotes

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

—E.B. White, 1944

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

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

—H. Rap Brown, 1967

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

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

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

Written 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 BC

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

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

—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865

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

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

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

—Catherine the Great, c. 1796