"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
— Mark Twain

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it."
— Mark Twain

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it."
— Malcolm X (By Any Means Necessary)

"The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian."
— Robert Orben

"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. "
— William S. Burroughs

"If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet."
— Keith Richards (Keith Richards: In His Own Words)

"Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair."
— George Burns

"Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves."
— Ronald Reagan

"How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?"
— Charles de Gaulle

"The French have a new president, the British will soon have a new P.M., and we envy them as we endure the endless wait for this small dim man to go back to Texas and resume his life."
— Garrison Keillor

"In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."
— Mark Twain

"If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams."
— Yann Martel (Self)

"I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting."
— Ronald Reagan

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."
— Robert E. Howard

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
— Harry S. Truman

"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. "
— Pericles

"If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle."
— Hillary Rodham Clinton

"I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well-administred; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
— Benjamin Franklin

"I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they're doing. I'm concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that's handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers"
— Howard Zinn

"In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office."
— Ambrose Bierce

"Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury."
— H.L. Mencken

"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."
— H.L. Mencken

"The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H. "
— Dan Savage (Skipping Towards Gomorrah)

"The president said some words, like nouns and verbs. "
— Ze Frank

"With regard to prudence and stability, I say a people is more prudent, more stable and more just than a prince."
— Niccolò Machiavelli (Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius)

"All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."
— H.L. Mencken

"Social conservatism and neoconservatism have revived authoritarian conservatism, and not for the better of conservatism or American democracy. True conservatism is cautious and prudent. Authoritarianism is rash and radical. American democracy has benefited from true conservatism, but authoritarianism offers potentially serious trouble for any democracy. "
— John W. Dean (Conservatives Without Conscience)

"No more good must be attempted than the nation can bear"
— Solon

"The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary. "
— Wilhelm Reich

"The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking"
— Marvin Bell (Mars Being Red)

"A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life."
— John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)

"Generalized statements ... which instill nebulous fear without specific information are exactly in line with the goals of terrorism. "
— Ze Frank

"Politics is what men do when metaphysics fails...It is the forging of common actuality in the absence of abstract independent standards."
— B. Barber

"Americans, though apparently impressed by ghastly sentimentality and outrageous hypocrisy, are by nature much more politically cynical than Canadians. In their longer history they have had much more to be cynical about. They demand a vulgar show, enjoy it, guffaw, and forget it the next morning. When a new U.S. President takes office all bets are off and his campaign platform is dismantled and stored away. "
— Gordon Donaldson (Eighteen Men : The Prime Ministers of Canada)

"DOGMA: a political belief one is unreasonably committed to, such as the notion that freedom is good and slavery is bad.
BIAS: predeliction for a particular dogma. For example, the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between.

(an early comment on backlash, from "Glossary for the Eighties")"
— Ellen Willis (1941-2006)

"In the evening [the Iraqi interim governor of Maysan province] asked me for fifty dollars to repair his windows, which had been destroyed in a recent demonstration. Although he was the governor, his salary was only four hundred and fifty dollars a month, and Baghdad had still not agreed to give the governors an independent budget.... For the sake of a tiny sum of money - a couple thousand dollars a month from the hundred billion we had spent on the invasion - we were alienating our key partner and successor.
p. 264"
— Rory Stewart (The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq)

"[Richard Bedford Bennett] was the richest Prime Minister and the only millionaire to hold office before Pierre Trudeau. His money obviously colored his thinking -- colored it true blue -- but he did not consider it a political drawback. No leader, he said, could serve the public properly if he was constantly looking over his shoulder at the shadow of debts. This theory is now widely accepted in the United States where it has become practically impossible for a non-millionaire to run for high office without selling pieces of himself like a prize-fighter. Yet the public still suspects a self-made millionaire like Lyndon Johnson while revering the much-richer John F. Kennedy, who got it all from his father. "
— Gordon Donaldson (Eighteen Men : The Prime Ministers of Canada)