Archive

Quotes

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850

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

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

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

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

—Che Guevara, 1968

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

—Mao Zedong, 1938

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

—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

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

—Robert Byrd, 2005

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

What, 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, 1855