Archive

Quotes

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

—Anthony Burgess, 1972

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

What, 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, 1855

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1944

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

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

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

—Frederick the Great, c. 1770

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

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

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

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

—Paul Valéry, 1943

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