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Quotes

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

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

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

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

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

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

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

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

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

—E.B. White, 1944

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

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811

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

—Anthony Burgess, 1972

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

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

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