Archive

Quotes

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

—H. Rap Brown, 1967

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

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

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

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

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

What, 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

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

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

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

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

—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850

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

—Herodotus, c. 425 BC