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Quotes

Politics is the art of the possible.

—Otto von Bismarck, 1867

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

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

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

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

—E.B. White, 1944

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1787

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

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

—Che Guevara, 1968

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

—Laozi, c. 500 BC

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

—Robert Byrd, 2005

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

—Mao Zedong, 1938

No 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, 1958