Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—Lord Acton, 1887Quotes
I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1944I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843What 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, 1944The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.
—Herodotus, c. 425 BCWhat, 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, 1855You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882A 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, 2000All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
—Al Smith, 1933Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.
—Catherine the Great, c. 1796