Archive

Quotes

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

—Catherine the Great, c. 1796

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

—Dean Acheson, 1970

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

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

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

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

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

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

—Paul Valéry, 1943

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1787

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

—Herodotus, c. 425 BC

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

What 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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985