Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944Quotes
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, 1215No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
—Hannah Arendt, 1958The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
—Tacitus, c. 117All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
—Al Smith, 1933Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.
—Charles de Gaulle, 1963The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.
—Herodotus, c. 425 BCI work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
—Vegetius, c. 385Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.
—H. Rap Brown, 1967What, 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, 1855