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Quotes

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

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

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

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

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

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

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774

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

—E.B. White, 1944

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330