Archive

Quotes

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

—Herodotus, c. 425 BC

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.

—Aristophanes, c. 424 BC

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

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

The 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, 1921

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

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

—H. Rap Brown, 1967

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

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

—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882

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

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908