Quotes by Statesmen

As God loves me, when I consider this, then every modern society seems to me to be nothing but a conspiracy of the rick, who while protesting their interest in the common good pursue their own interests and stop at no trick and deception to secure their ill-gotten possessions, to pay as little as possible for the labor that produces their wealth and so force its makers to accept the nearest thing to nothing. They contrive rules for securing and assuring these tidy profits for the rich in the name of the common good, including of course the poor, and call them laws!
Thomas More
...certain people have good, ordinary blood and others have an animated, lively sort of blood that comes to the face quickly.
Seneca
He'd have improved if you'd not givenHim a mere glimmer of the light in heaven;He calls it Reason, and it has only increasedHis power to be beastlier than a beast.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,things standing shall fall,but the moving ever shall stay.
Basava
It was evidently quite obvious to a powerful intellect like his that the one essential condition for a healthy society was equal distribution of goods - which I suspect is impossible under capitalism. For, when everyone's entitled to get as much for himself as he can, all available property, however much there is of it, is bound to fall into the hands of a small minority, which means that everyone else is poor.
Thomas More
Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best
Otto von Bismarck
No one, on his deathbed, ever regretted having been a Catholic.
Thomas More
He who is brave is free
Seneca
The most part of all princes have more delight in warlike manners and feats of chivalry than in the good feats of peace.
Thomas More
distringit librorum multitudo (the abundance of books is distraction)
Seneca
As contraries are known by contraries, so is the delights of presence best known by the torments of absence.
Alcibiades
Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no further: and we see the times inclined to atheism (as the time of Augustus Cæsar) were civil times. But superstition hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new primum mobile, that ravisheth all the spheres of government. The master of superstition is the people; and in all superstition wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order.
Francis Bacon
Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We've been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.
Seneca
You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration’s to your taste,But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe