Society and the World

Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

It’s a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.

It’s a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.

A statesman is a politician who’s been dead 10 or 15 years.

All the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

You [the Mensheviks] are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of history!

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

Their starting point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

Experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform.

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.

Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

It takes two to speak the truth,—one to speak, and another to hear.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

A man you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;