The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.
—LaoziQuotes
On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580What 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, 1830There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.
—Walter Bagehot, 1863No 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, 1958Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1944In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.
—Judge Learned Hand, 1944Every country has the government it deserves.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1811What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855The 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, 1774I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.
—Catherine the Great, c. 1796