I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917Quotes
My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.
—Frederick the Great, c. 1770The 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, 1921On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.
—Dean Acheson, 1970Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.
—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832It 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. 1515Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.
—Arthur Miller, 2001He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.
—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
—Mario Cuomo, 1985No 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