Envy is the basis of democracy.
—Bertrand Russell, 1930Quotes
If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.
—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330What, 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, 1855The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
—Tacitus, c. 117The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1787What 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, 1830I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.
—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.
—Laozi, c. 500 BCIn politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.
—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong, 1938