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Quotes

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

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

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

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

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

—E.B. White, 1944

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

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774

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

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

—Frederick the Great, c. 1770

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

—Al Smith, 1933

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

—Laozi, c. 500 BC