Archive

Quotes

A 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, 2000

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

—Laozi, c. 500 BC

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

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

—H. Rap Brown, 1967

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

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

—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

—Arthur Miller, 2001

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

—Quintus Fabius Maximus, c. 203 BC

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

—Paul Valéry, 1943

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

—Robert Byrd, 2005

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

—Dean Acheson, 1970

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

—Tacitus, c. 117