Archive

Quotes

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

No 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, 1215

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

—Che Guevara, 1968

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

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

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

—Dean Acheson, 1970

I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

—Arthur Miller, 2001

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

—Robert Byrd, 2005

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

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

—Anacharsis, c. 550 BC

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811