Philosophy Quotes

"It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late."

- Cioran

"In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world."

- Franz Kafka

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."

- Hannah Arendt

"A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg."

- Samuel Butler

"Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice."

- Robert Frost

"There is a plan and a purpose, a value to every life, no matter what its location, age, gender or disability"

- Sharron Angle

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead."

- G.K. Chesterton

"Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

- Winston Churchill

"Salus populi suprema lex esto [the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law]."

- Cicero

"Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge anyone to show where in nature any rights existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws."

- Calvin Coolidge

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

- Winston Churchill

"…the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."

- Thomas Paine

"Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time."

- E.B. White

"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government."

- Thomas Jefferson

"That government is best which governs least."

- Henry David Thoreau

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

- Lord Acton

"Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between [people], and their beliefs – in religion, literature, colleges and schools – democracy in all public and private life…"

- Walt Whitman

"A bird in hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing."

- Bret Harte

"An essential element in the meaning of the common good among the members of a group is what the members would choose if they possessed the fullest attainable understanding of the experience that would result from their choice and its most relevant alternatives. Because enlightened understanding is required, I would propose to incorporate opportunities to acquire enlightened understanding as essential also to the meaning of the common good. Still further, the rights and opportunities of the democratic process are elements of the common good. Even more broadly, because the institutions of polyarchy are necessary in order to employ the democratic process on a large scale, in a unit as large as a country all of the institutions of polyarchy should also be counted as elements of the common good."

- Robert Dahl

"A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none."

- Joseph de Maistre

"Agitation and mutability are inherent in the nature of democratic republics, just as stagnation and sleepiness are the law of absolute monarchies."

- Alexis de Tocqueville

"Is it your object to refine the habits, embellish the manners, and cultivate the arts, to promote the love of poetry, beauty, and glory? Would you constitute a people fitted to act powerfully upon all other nations, and prepared for those high enterprises which, whatever be their results, will leave a name forever famous in history? If you believe such to be the principal object of society, avoid the government of the democracy."

- Alexis de Tocqueville

"Yet as I read the Constitution, one of its essential purposes was to take government off the backs of people and keep it off."

- William O. Douglas

"Every democratic system evolves its own conventions. It is not only the water but the banks which make the river."

- Indira Gandhi

"I often think it’s comical How Nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal, That’s born into the world alive, Is either a little Liberal, Or else a little Conservative!"

- W.S. Gilbert

"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world."

- Benjamin Harrison

"They that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government."

- Thomas Hobbes

"So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable."

- Aldous Huxley

"Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them."

- William R. Inge

"There is hope...but not for us."