Archive

Quotes

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

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, 2000

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

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

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

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

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

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

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

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005

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

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995