Archive

Quotes

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515

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

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1944

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

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

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

—Horace, c. 8 BC

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 campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

—Dean Acheson, 1970

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

—Robert Byrd, 2005