← Categories

Politics & History

50 quotes

"Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company."

George Washington

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

George Washington

"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"Things are more like they are now than they ever were before."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"The sympathy of sorrow is stronger than the sympathy of prosperity."

Benjamin Disraeli

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite."

Winston Churchill

"It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody."

Richard M. Nixon

"No sane man will dance."

Marcus Tullius Cicero

"They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do."

Lyndon Baines Johnson

"Too often I find that the volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases."

Governor Jerry Brown

"Human kind has to get out of violence only through nonviolence. Hatred can be overcome only by love. Counter-hatred only increases the surface as well as the depth of hatred."

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The secret of success is constancy of purpose."

Benjamin Disraeli

"Be polite to all, but intimate with few."

Thomas Jefferson

"It is a misfortune for a woman never to be loved, but it is a humiliation to be loved no more."

Montesquieu

"The most violent element in society is ignorance."

Emma Goldman

"I believe...that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another."

Thomas Jefferson

"Nature, like man, sometimes weeps for gladness."

Benjamin Disraeli

"Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others."

Winston Churchill

"I took a look around the office. ... I walked out and closed the door behind me. I knew that I would not be back there again. (On leaving the Executive Office Building)"

Richard M. Nixon

"Mankind has grown strong in external struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace."

Adolf Hitler

"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"It is not only [the juror's] right, but his duty, in that case, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgement, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."

John Adams

"The best way to make a fire with two sticks is to make sure one of them is a match."

Will Rogers

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

John Kenneth Galbraith

"I don't know who my grandfather was; I'm much more concerned to know what his grandson will be."

Abraham Lincoln

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

"If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values -- that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."

Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)

"Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited."

Henry Kissinger

"The eyes of the social herd, who always observe little things, and generally form from them their opinions of great affairs."

Benjamin Disraeli

"To insist on strength ... is not war-mongering. It is peace-mongering."

Barry Goldwater

"Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct."

Thomas Jefferson

"In giving you these tapes, blemishes and all, I am placing my trust in the basic fairness of the American people."

Richard M. Nixon

"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn."

Marcus Tullius Cicero

"As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end."

Adlai Ewing Stevenson

"You never know what's hit you. A gunshot is the perfect way. (When asked how he would choose to die)"

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government."

George Washington

"The affections are the children of ignorance; when the horizon of our experience expands, and models multiply, love and admiration imperceptibly vanish."

Benjamin Disraeli

"The happiest moments of my life have a been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family."

Thomas Jefferson

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."

Winston Churchill

"Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing."

George Orwell

"The time is always right to do what is right."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

"The indulgence in grief is a blunder."

Benjamin Disraeli

"To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society."

Theodore Roosevelt

"It is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand."

John Maynard Keynes

"If you have any interests you can gain a wider audience for those interests while the goldfish bowl is yours."

Eleanor Roosevelt