Quotes, Aphorisms, Laws, and Thoughts

This collection of quotes started life in the early nineties for an After Dark screen saver module. The quotes had to be short enough to fit on a 9" Macintosh screen and pithy enough to warrant the trouble of typing them in. People requested copies but, at that time, there was no After Dark for Windows and only Macintosh users enjoyed the collection.

To allow a wider distribution, a slow conversion to a text file was started (there was no easy way of exporting the quotes from After Dark) which in 1997 became this website. It was created using plain HTML which made updating a laborious process. It had a quite a bit of success but interested tapered off as there were no new additions. In 2009 it was revamped to use a MySQL database to provide flexibility, a search option, and to slowly include new quotes found over the last twelve years.

Politics

A conservative is a politician who wants to keep what the liberals fought for a generation ago.
Anonymous

A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.
Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

A liberal is a conservative who has gone to jail, and a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.
Anonymous

A liberal is someone too poor to be a capitalist, and too rich to be a communist.
Anonymous

A liberal thinks that goats are just sheep from broken homes.
Anonymous

An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.
Simon Cameron (1799-1889)

Any man who is under thirty, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over thirty, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
Anonymous

Banana Republic Constitution: Prohibido todo lo que no sea obligatorio.
Anonymous

Bread is the staff of life; toast a decadent capitalist luxury.
Anonymous

Congressmen are the finest body of men money can buy.
Anonymous

Conspiracy theories depend on the perpetrators being endlessly clever. The facts work if you assume everyone is endlessly stupid.
Anonymous

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
E.B. White (1899-1985)

Don't vote, it only encourages them.
Anonymous

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
Anonymous

I must follow them. I am their leader.
Bonar Law (1858-1923)

If a million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France (1844-1924)

If I were two-faced would I be wearing this one?
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

If voting changed anything it would be illegal.
Anonymous

In a mature society, 'civil servant' is semantically equal to 'civil master'.
Anonymous

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
Tom Stoppard (1937- )

Men and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted.
Anonymous

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.
Henry Kissinger (1923- )

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.
Anonymous

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

One fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
Robert Kennedy (1925-1968)

People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river.
Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971)

Politics is like being a football coach. You've got to be smart enough to play the game and dumb enough to think it is important.
Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005)

Politics is the art of the possible.
Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898)

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Henry Kissinger (1923- )

Pro is to con as progress is to Congress.
Anonymous

Taxes are not raised for the benefit of the taxed.
Anonymous

The best audience is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk.
Alben W. Barkley (1877-1956)

The supply of government exceeds the demand.
Anonymous

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.
George Burns (1896-1996)

We would all like to vote for the best man but he is never a candidate.
Anonymous

What luck for rulers that men do not think.
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long.
Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007)