politics
The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
A constitution is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.
- Edmund Burke
Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
- John Marshall Harlan
A sort of Socratic spirit will necessarily grow up, wherever large bodies assemble.
- John Thelwall
The laws are spider webs, they catch the little, but are brushed aside by the big.
- Saying in the Spanish Indies
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A law is a prediction of what the courts will do.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Law forces us to distill things down to their essence.
- Mary Jo White
Lawyers are on all sides of all questions.
- Richard Kluger
A lawyer is simply a highly skilled technician who does not build or erect or paint anything. He does not create. All he does is lubricate the wheels of society by implementing the rules of conduct by which the organized life of men must be carried on.
- John W. Davis
If this is not democracy, then it is difficult to imagine what is.
- Robert Moses
To re-educate the people in the love of liberty is more difficult than to conquer liberty.
- Babeuf
Understanding political power in a democracy requires understanding elections.
- Robert Caro
All winning campaigns communicate optimism.
- Richard Ben Cramer
Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest arts.
- Felix Frankfurter
The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people.
- Lyndon B. Johnson
Vom Staat soll an erster Stelle die Rede sein.
- A principal shared among German historians.
Symbolism becomes considerably more important in foreign policy issues than in bread and butter domestic issues where the voter can measure promises and rhetoric against performance and reliability.
- Richard Holbrooke
In government, foolish certainty usually beats fragile wisdom.
- George Packer
It is not the nature of established governments to opt for change, even in their own interests.
- Barbara Tuchman
Neither King John’s barons nor Go-Shirakawa’s warlords knew they were exponents of feudalism.
- George Sansom
Government by precedent, without regard of the principals behind precedent, is one of the vilest systems that can be setup.
- Thomas Paine
In democracy, people usually get the kind of government they deserve.
- Adlai Stevenson
It is not the business of the public to alter private contracts.
- John D. Rockefeller
Guilty and mad will be the hour when Congress can find no better way to conduct the finances of the nation than to print an unlimited issue of irredeemable promises to pay.
- Roscoe Conkling
The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean Ukraine.
- George Bush
War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
- William Sherman
Artillery deepens the tone of the argument.
- Shelby Foote
Happy is the country that produces a hero. Unhappy is the people that need one.
- Bertolt Brecht
Leadership in a world economy is an experience of power which may one day blind the victor to the march of history.
- Fernand Braudel
So often in international affairs, hawkish paranoia can create the monster that is most feared.
- William Dalrymple
Inaction and inactivity are as decisive as action itself.
- Richard Holbrooke
Patents add the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.
- Abraham Lincoln