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 BCQuotes
I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784Envy is the basis of democracy.
—Bertrand Russell, 1930Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.
—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850What, 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, 1855It 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. 1515Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.
—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.
—Herodotus, c. 425 BCLet him who desires peace prepare for war.
—Vegetius, c. 385Why 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