You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
—Mario Cuomo, 1985Quotes
In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
—Aristophanes, c. 424 BCEvery country has the government it deserves.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1811The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1787No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
—Magna Carta, 1215Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
—Vegetius, c. 385I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.
—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792What, 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, 1855A 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, 2000Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
—Alexander Hamilton, 1787On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580