Archive

Quotes

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

—E.B. White, 1944

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1944

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

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

—Horace, c. 8 BC

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

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

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

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

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

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

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

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

—Robert Byrd, 2005