On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580Quotes
You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
—Aristophanes, c. 424 BCOut of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
—Al Smith, 1933Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—Lord Acton, 1887O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.
—Horace, c. 8 BCTo be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.
—Quintus Fabius Maximus, c. 203 BCThe 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, 1921What, 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, 1855Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong, 1938The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1908The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
—Anthony Burgess, 1972Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944