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

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

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

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

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

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

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

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

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

—George Borrow, 1843

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

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

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

—E.B. White, 1944

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

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

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

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385