Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
Jeff Valdez
1. "Bureacracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."
Mary McCarthy, "On the Contrary"
Other categories: Various
2. "I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone."
John Updike
3. "The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests."
Gail Sheehy
Other categories: Success and Fame
4. "Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading."
John Updike, "Buchanan Dying"
5. "In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
6. "Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation."
George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman"
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
7. "France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams."
Thomas Carlyle, "History of the French Revolution"
Other categories: History and Nations -:- Wit and Humor
8. "My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I am a free citizen."
George Bernard Shaw, "Arms and the Man"
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude
9. "Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory."
Salman Rushdie
Other categories: Art and Culture -:- Politics and Diplomacy
10. "It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in."
graffito, London, 70's
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
11. "Let the people think they govern and they will be governed."
William Penn, "Some Fruits of Solitude"
12. "Let’s not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea, just pie in the sky."
Boris Yeltsin
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
13. "There is something behind the throne greater than the King himself."
William Pitt the Elder
14. "Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both."
George Bernard Shaw, "Misalliance"
Other categories: Law and Crime
15. "No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown."
William Penn, "No Cross, No Crown"
Other categories: Pain and Tears
16. "The people are the government, administering it by their agents; they are the government, the sovereign power."
Andrew Jackson
17. "Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do."
George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman"
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude -:- History and Nations
18. "An illiterate king is a crowned ass."
English proverb
Other categories: Education
19. "The French are nice people. I allow them to sing and to write, and they allow me to do whatever I like."
Jules Mazarin
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude
20. "The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away."
Ronald Reagan
Other categories: Intellect, Judgement
21. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad man."
John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st Baron Acton
Other categories: Power and Weakness
22. "There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government."
Benjamin Franklin
Other categories: Law and Crime
23. "Whoever is new to power is always harsh."
Aeschylus, "Prometheus Bound"
Other categories: Power and Weakness
24. "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
Other categories: Power and Weakness -:- Time and Passing
25. "Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."
George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
Other categories: Power and Weakness
26. "Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers."
François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), "Voltaire’s Notebooks"
27. "Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held."
Aldous Huxley, "Beyond the Mexique Bay"
Other categories: History and Nations
28. "The happiness of society is the end of government."
John Adams, "Thoughts on Government"
Other categories: Happiness
29. "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
John Adams, "The Works of John Adams"
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
30. "Authority forgets a dying king."
Alfred Tennyson, "Idylls of the King"
Other categories: Life and Death
31. "In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other."
François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), "Philosophical Dictionary"
Other categories: Richness and Money
32. "Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum."
P.J. O`Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"
Other categories: History and Nations
33. "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
P.J. O`Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"
Other categories: Power and Weakness
34. "Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy."
P.J. O`Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
35. "Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us."
P.J. O`Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
36. "Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us."
P.J. O`Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"
37. "A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past."
Fidel Castro
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
38. "Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic."
Henry Brooks Adams, "The Education of Henry Adams"
Other categories: Power and Weakness
39. "At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man walking into the little booth with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point."
Winston Churchill
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
40. "The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided."
Casey Stengel
41. "Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."
Laurence J. Peter
Other categories: Various
42. "A poor man who takes a rich wife has a ruler, not a wife."
Greek proverb
Other categories: Marriage -:- Richness and Money
43. "Twelve highlanders and a bagpipe make a rebellion."
Scottish proverb
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude -:- Patriotism
44. "We live under a government of men and morning newspapers."
Wendell Phillips
45. "The government is best which makes itself unnecessary."
Wilhelm von Humboldt
46. "It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own."
Herbert Hoover
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude
47. "A leader must have the courage to act against an expert's advice."
James Callaghan
Other categories: Bravery and Fear -:- Success and Fame
48. "The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal."
Erich Fromm
Other categories: Law and Crime
49. "It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power."
Kim Stanley Robinson, "Green Mars"
Other categories: Power and Weakness
50. "Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive."
Theodore Roosevelt
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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