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Quotes

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

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

—Laozi

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1944

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

No 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, 1958

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865

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

—E.B. White, 1944

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

—Anacharsis, c. 550 BC

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

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

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

—Mao Zedong, 1938

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

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

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967