Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—Lord Acton, 1887Quotes
A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.
—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.
—Quintus Fabius Maximus, c. 203 BCWhether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.
—Arthur Miller, 2001Every country has the government it deserves.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1811The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1787I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!
—George H. W. Bush, 1990The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.
—Judge Learned Hand, 1944There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.
—Anthony Trollope, 1862A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967What 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, 1830Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944