Archive

Quotes

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

—Catherine the Great, c. 1796

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

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

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

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

—Anthony Burgess, 1972

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

—Horace, c. 8 BC

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

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.

—Aristophanes, c. 424 BC

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944