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James Madison46 quotes
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. — James Madison · 1789Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. — James Madison · 1788Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. — James Madison · 1787Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. — James Madison · 1789Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency. — James Madison · 1787It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. — James Madison · 1788All 46 quotes →John Stuart Mill29 quotes
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. — John Stuart Mill · 1859A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for...is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free. — John Stuart Mill · 1862We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. — John Stuart Mill · 1859The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors. — John Stuart Mill · 1859An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer. — John Stuart Mill · 1859Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called. — John Stuart Mill · 1859All 29 quotes →Alexander Hamilton25 quotes
Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint. — Alexander Hamilton · 1787It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. — Alexander Hamilton · 1787The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority. — Alexander Hamilton · 1787Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants. — Alexander Hamilton · 1787The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power. — Alexander Hamilton · 1775The vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty. — Alexander Hamilton · 1787All 25 quotes →Thomas Paine24 quotes
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good. — Thomas Paine · 1792But where says some is the king of America?...In America the law is king. — Thomas Paine · 1776If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. — Thomas Paine · 1776These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial and article as Freedom should not be highly rated. — Thomas Paine · 1776The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. — Thomas Paine · 1776He who dares not offend cannot be honest. — Thomas Paine · 1776All 24 quotes →Edmund Burke21 quotes
A state without some means of change is without the means of its own conservation. — Edmund Burke · 1790Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions. — Edmund Burke · 1790Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine, that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field. — Edmund Burke · 1790By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little. — Edmund Burke · 1790Superstition is the religion of feeble minds. — Edmund Burke · 1790Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other. — Edmund Burke · 1796All 21 quotes →Alexis de Tocqueville19 quotes
Religious insanity is very common in the United States. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1840Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1840The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do; this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1840Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure.... Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1840They have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1835Nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1835All 19 quotes →Aristotle15 quotes
Man is by nature a political animal. — Aristotle · 350 BCNo tyrant need fear till men begin to feel confident in each other. — Aristotle · 350 BCThe basis of a democratic state is liberty. — Aristotle · 350 BCWhere some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses. — Aristotle · 350 BCHe who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled. — Aristotle · 335 BCThe best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class. — Aristotle · 350 BCAll 15 quotes →Niccolo Machiavelli15 quotes
God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us. — Niccolo Machiavelli · 1532Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasions for it. — Niccolo Machiavelli · 1531A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves. — Niccolo Machiavelli · 1532The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have good laws. — Niccolo Machiavelli · 1532Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised. — Niccolo Machiavelli · 1532It is much safer to be feared than loved. — Niccolo Machiavelli · 1527All 15 quotes →Karl Marx13 quotes
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. — Karl Marx · 1848The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. — Karl Marx · 1848From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs! — Karl Marx · 1883The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. — Karl Marx · 1848A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. — Karl Marx · 1848Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. — Karl Marx · 1852All 13 quotes →Thomas Hobbes12 quotes
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain... And the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. — Thomas Hobbes · 1651Curiosity...is a Lust of the mind. — Thomas Hobbes · 1651No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. — Thomas Hobbes · 1651Such truth as opposeth no man's profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome. — Thomas Hobbes · 1651Riches, knowledge and honour are but several sorts of power. — Thomas Hobbes · 1651I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. — Thomas Hobbes · 1651All 12 quotes →John Locke10 quotes
Where-ever Law ends, Tyranny begins. — John Locke · 1690The end of law is not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge freedom. — John Locke · 1690Virtue is harder to be got, than a Knowledge of the World; and, if lost in a young Man, is seldom recover'd. — John Locke · 1693He that will have his Son have a Respect for him and his Orders, must himself have a great Reverence for his Son. — John Locke · 1693The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty and puts on the bonds of civil society is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community. — John Locke · 1690Man being...by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent. — John Locke · 1690All 10 quotes →John Milton10 quotes
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. — John Milton · 1644Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are. — John Milton · 1644None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. — John Milton · 1649No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free. — John Milton · 1649Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. — John Milton · 1644Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew the Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? — John Milton · 1644All 10 quotes →Jean-Jacques Rousseau9 quotes
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from its birth, and bears in itself the cause of its destruction. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1755Censorship is crucial for preserving morals but useless for restoring them. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1755All 9 quotes →Mary Wollstonecraft9 quotes
No man chooses evil, because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1790It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792Virtue can only flourish amongst equals. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1790I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792All 9 quotes →George Orwell8 quotes
Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. — George Orwell · 1946To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration. — George Orwell · 1946When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. — George Orwell · 1936In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. — George Orwell · 1946When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy... The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved. — George Orwell · 1946Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting. — George Orwell · 1945All 8 quotes →Hannah Arendt8 quotes
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. — Hannah Arendt · 1963To abolish the fences of laws between men—as tyranny does—means to take away man's liberties and destroy freedom as a living political reality; for the space between men as it is hedged in by laws, is the living space of freedom. — Hannah Arendt · 1951The worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope. — Hannah Arendt · 1951The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim. — Hannah Arendt · 1969The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core. — Hannah Arendt · 1963The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution. — Hannah Arendt · 1970All 8 quotes →Jeremy Bentham7 quotes
It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong. — Jeremy Bentham · 1776A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? — Jeremy Bentham · 1789All punishment is mischief: all punishment in itself is evil. — Jeremy Bentham · 1789Every law is contrary to liberty. — Jeremy Bentham · 1832Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity. — Jeremy Bentham · 1832Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts. — Jeremy Bentham · 1832All 7 quotes →Oscar Wilde7 quotes
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. — Oscar Wilde · 1891Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority. — Oscar Wilde · 1891Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime. — Oscar Wilde · 1891The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. — Oscar Wilde · 1891Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. — Oscar Wilde · 1891Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature...to sympathise with a friend's success. — Oscar Wilde · 1891All 7 quotes →Thomas Jefferson7 quotes
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. — Thomas Jefferson · 1785It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. — Thomas Jefferson · 1787The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. — Thomas Jefferson · 1785Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effet of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. — Thomas Jefferson · 1785The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time. — Thomas Jefferson · 1774Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong. — Thomas Jefferson · 1785All 7 quotes →John Adams6 quotes
The happiness of society is the end of government. — John Adams · 1776Let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing. — John Adams · 1765The jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible to destroy, the freedom of thinking, speaking and writing. — John Adams · 1765Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right... and a desire to know-but besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded, and envied kind of knowledge. I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers. — John Adams · 1765The judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and the executive, and independent upon both, that so it may be a check upon both, as both should be checks upon that. — John Adams · 1776Fear is the foundation of most governments. — John Adams · 1776Albert Camus5 quotes
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is. — Albert Camus · 1951What is a rebel? A man who says no. — Albert Camus · 1951It is not rebellion itself that is noble, but what it demands of you. — Albert Camus · 1947Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic. — Albert Camus · 1951When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning. — Albert Camus · 1957Walter Bagehot4 quotes
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. — Walter Bagehot · 1872The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm. — Walter Bagehot · 1872You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.... Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits. — Walter Bagehot · 1856The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people. — Walter Bagehot · 1867Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn3 quotes
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1973In our village, folk say God crumbles up the old moon into stars. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1962You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power-he's free again. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1968Frantz Fanon3 quotes
Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them. — Frantz Fanon · 1961When I search for man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders. — Frantz Fanon · 1961I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos. — Frantz Fanon · 1952Friedrich Engels3 quotes
The State is not "abolished", it withers away. — Friedrich Engels · 1878Naturally, the workers are perfectly free; the manufacturer does not force them to take his materials and his cards, but he says to them…"If you don't like to be frizzled in my frying-pan, you can take a walk into the fire." — Friedrich Engels · 1845All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life. — Friedrich Engels · 1878George Mason3 quotes
The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments. — George Mason · 1776Government is, or ought to be instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community; of all the various modes and forms of government, that is best which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety, and is most effectually secured against the danger of maladministration. — George Mason · 1776That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. — George Mason · 1776Henry David Thoreau3 quotes
I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least";... Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all." — Henry David Thoreau · 1848Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison... The only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. — Henry David Thoreau · 1848All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. — Henry David Thoreau · 1848Isaiah Berlin3 quotes
Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. — Isaiah Berlin · 1958Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance—these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible. — Isaiah Berlin · 1950Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human. — Isaiah Berlin · 1969James Monroe3 quotes
The American continents... Are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. — James Monroe · 1823We owe it, therefore, to candor, and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. — James Monroe · 1823In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do. — James Monroe · 1823Karl Popper3 quotes
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. — Karl Popper · 1945The history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder. — Karl Popper · 1945There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. — Karl Popper · 1945