What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830Quotes
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
—Mario Cuomo, 1985Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
—Vegetius, c. 385The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
—Anthony Burgess, 1972Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.
—Laozi, c. 500 BCEnvy is the basis of democracy.
—Bertrand Russell, 1930No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
—Magna Carta, 1215A 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, 2000Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.
—Catherine the Great, c. 1796Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944It 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. 1515You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
—Aristophanes, c. 424 BC