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Quotes

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

Politics is the art of the possible.

—Otto von Bismarck, 1867

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1944

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

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

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

—Herodotus, c. 425 BC

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

The 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, 1921

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

—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850