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Quotes

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

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1787

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 U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

—Anthony Burgess, 1972

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

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

—Aristophanes, c. 424 BC

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

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

—E.B. White, 1944

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

No 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

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