In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830Quotes
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1908The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
—Anthony Burgess, 1972I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong, 1938O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.
—Horace, c. 8 BCTelevision has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
—Hannah Arendt, 1958The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.
—John Nance Garner, c. 1967The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
—Tacitus, c. 117All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
—Al Smith, 1933What 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