Archive

Quotes

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

—Catherine the Great, c. 1796

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

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

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

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

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

—George Borrow, 1843

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

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

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

—Anthony Burgess, 1972

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

If 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. 1330