An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.
—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865Quotes
You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
—Aristophanes, c. 424 BCWhat, 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, 1855The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1787I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.
—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.
—Laozi, c. 500 BCEnvy is the basis of democracy.
—Bertrand Russell, 1930All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
—Al Smith, 1933The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.
—Judge Learned Hand, 1944