"The first mistake in public business is the going into it."
--Benjamin Franklin

"I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody."
--Benjamin Franklin

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression."
--Thomas Paine

"Politics is more difficult than physics."
--Albert Einstein

"If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking."
--Lyndon B. Johnson

"Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”
--Chinese Proverb

"In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place."
--Mahatma Gandhi

"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
--Abraham Lincoln

"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. ...Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
--Frederick Douglass

"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber."
--Plato

"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river."
--Nikita Khrushchev

"The best thing about this group of candidates is that only one of them can win."
--Will Rogers

"Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair."
--George Burns

"Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre."
--Goethe

"To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice."
--Confucius

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
--Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them."
--Paul Valery