Archive

Quotes

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

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

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

—Robert Byrd, 2005

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

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

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

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

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

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

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

—Laozi

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

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

—Paul Valéry, 1943

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

—H. Rap Brown, 1967