Archive

Quotes

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882

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

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1944

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

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

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865

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

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

No 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, 1958

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

—Herodotus, c. 425 BC

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

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005