Archive

Quotes

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

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

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

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

—Mao Zedong, 1938

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

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

Why 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, 1787

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

—Horace, c. 8 BC

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

—E.B. White, 1944

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

—Anthony Burgess, 1972

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

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

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967