I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917Quotes
Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.
—Charles de Gaulle, 1963The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.
—Che Guevara, 1968A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry, 1943The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
—H.L. Mencken, 1921What, 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, 1855Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
—Vegetius, c. 385There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.
—Walter Bagehot, 1863