O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.
—Horace, c. 8 BCQuotes
It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.
—Francis Bacon, 1625I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.
—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
—Mario Cuomo, 1985A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong, 1938What 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, 1830The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.
—LaoziYou should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1944It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830