Archive

Quotes

Politics is the art of the possible.

—Otto von Bismarck, 1867

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

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

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

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

—E.B. White, 1944

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

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

What, 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, 1855

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

—Al Smith, 1933

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1944

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865