politics Quotes

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.

I have written on all sorts of subjects... yet I have no enemies; except indeed all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.

It is a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.

Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end; it has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.

He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.

The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.