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Quotes

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

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

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

—Che Guevara, 1968

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

—Robert Byrd, 2005

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

—Anacharsis, c. 550 BC

What 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, 1830

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

—H. Rap Brown, 1967

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

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

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

—Laozi, c. 500 BC

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887