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Quotes

No 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, 1215

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

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

—Tacitus, c. 117

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

—Herodotus, c. 425 BC

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

—Mao Zedong, 1938

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

—Dean Acheson, 1970

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

—Che Guevara, 1968

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

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

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, 1830

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

—Anthony Trollope, 1862