A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
Bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some va
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others- only to lose it over themselves.
Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
Human behavior is timeless.
If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.
In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
In the midst of events there is no perspective.
In the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight.
In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced.
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.
Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states.
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.
What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?
When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
Found 38 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).
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