Shakespeare said that “brevity is the soul of wit,” meaning that the ability to say something important with just a few words is the best proof of wisdom. Here are some wise but brief quotes from great minds of the past and present. You can click on the picture to go further into the ideas.
“The people who say that they have not time to attend to politics are simply saying that they are unfit to live in a free community.”
Theodore Roosevelt
from his famous speech: The Duties of American Citizenship, 1883
“America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on an ideal. Because of our polyglot background, we have all the strength in the world. That is the American way.”
Ronald Reagan
“In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds.”
Frederick Douglas
Egypt built the pyramids. Germany gave the world Beethoven. Jamaica gave it reggae. Every nation, nearly, excels in something. America’s special contribution to humanity is the vision of equal justice and equal opportunity for all.
“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old. Seek what they sought.”
17th Century Japanese poet/philosopher Matsuo Basho
America’s founders risked change in the hope of establishing a more perfect union. They didn’t achieve perfection. Latter generations that refuse to take the risks that are necessary in their own time dishonor the founders they claim to admire.
"Everything that rises must converge."
French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
This is a tremendously encouraging idea. There are many ways to be wrong, but only one way to be right. So it you seek greater understanding and higher principles, you’ll be more right yourself, and you’ll understand the wisdom of others, too.
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We must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities, we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality, we must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our Commission and Community in the work. . . . for we must consider that we shall be as a city Upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”
John Winthrop, June 1630
Part of the famous sermon Winthrop delivered as the Plymouth Bay settlers went ashore to settle America.
“People speak with incredible contempt about the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president or the entire US government. It’s a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime. Now its applied to our fellow citizens. It’s complete madness. We live in a society that basically is at war with itself.”
War correspondent & writer Sebastian Junger, Tribe
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Liberty, I am told, is a Divine thing. Liberty when it becomes the 'Liberty to die by starvation' is not so divine!”
Thomas Carlyle, Past & Present
“The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please. We ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations.”
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure.”
Thomas Jefferson, in 1787.
Jefferson was wrong. Blood is not necessary. Respectful discussion and sincere engagement are sufficient to refresh American democracy. Leave blood out of it!
“It is the mark of an educated man to require, in each kind of inquiry, just so much exactness as the subject admits of. It is equally absurd to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician, and to demand scientific proof from an orator.”
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
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It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough to reach the bottom at such places as are necessary to direct his voyage, and caution him against running upon shoals that may ruin him. Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.”
John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding
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A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. The same thing is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
George Orwell, essay on Politics and the English Language
an apt warning for the age of Twitter
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
Ray Bradbury
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
Economist John Maynard Keynes
“The whole difficulty in our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health that other men would uncompromisingly call states of disease.”
English author G. K. Chesterton
“If the windows of various ministries and newspapers were more often broken, if certain people were more often put under pumps and pelted in the streets, we should get on a great deal better.”
English author C.S. Lewis
Lewis was a gentle, harmless, quiet scholarly man. But he recognized that people in power do violence, and should be resisted.
“As a nation, we have lost our constitutional imagination. We have become far too timid about amending our Constitution to deal with new problems and changed circumstances, and also to bring that hallowed document into line with our more egalitarian moral commitments. A lot has happened since 1788.
E.J. Dionne, Washington Post
“The Constitution’s framers did their job, in their time. They designed a system of government that worked to call the country, with all our flaws and all our potential for greatness, into being. But they did not design a system of government that is working in our time. That is our job.”
Ezra Klein, Vox
“I yield slowly and reluctantly to the conviction that our Constitution cannot last.”
Chief Justice John Marshall, in 1832
“When highly committed parties strongly believe [in] things that they cannot achieve democratically, they don’t give up on their beliefs — they give up on democracy.”
Author and commentator David Frum
“The American people feel today that the system isn’t working for them. And I think they are largely right. I think what they have not internalized is that big government is invariably primarily a servant of the strong. Of the organized. The educated. The affluent. The ‘lawyered up.’”
Conservative columnist George F. Will, Sept 16, 2013.
For many years, Will was a staunch conservative and Republican. But he has left the GOP and changed his message. There’s no hope in trusting either party anymore. The system doesn’t work.
“The whole process of coming together should be uncomfortable for everyone involved — that’s how you know it’s working. And if Biden is only doing things he’s comfortable with, then it’s not enough.”
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teen aged boys. . . a little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.”
Conservative pundit P. J. O’Rourke
“An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?”
(Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?
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– Swedish diplomat Axel Oxenstierna c. 1650
Oxenstierna’s son was going on his first great diplomatic mission and confessed to his father he wasn’t sure he was up to the responsibility. The father reassured his son with this double-barreled quip. The first meaning is, “The world’s leaders aren’t especially smart, so don’t fear them.” The second meaning is, “The world goes along pretty much on it’s own whether the government interferes or not. So don’t fret too much.”
“Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”
Edmund Burke
Burke is, more than any other one person, the father of political conservatism. Here, he insists that moral restraint and right conduct — not liberty — are the bedrocks of a good society.
“I long to hear that you have declared an independency -- and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.”
Abigail Adams, in a letter to John Adams in April 1776
In its beginning, America strove to be better than the past — not to preserve past injustices.
“I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.”
Warren G. Harding, president of the United States from 1921 to 1923.
The founders imagined they had developed a political system that would guarantee only competent men rose to the top. They were wrong.
“I’ve never been in politics before, but even in the brief time that I’ve been running for Governor, I’ve been exposed to some of the worst people I’ve ever known. Liars, cowards, sociopaths. They are often deeply broken and disturbed people, who — like criminals who prey on the innocent — take their pleasure and make their living by victimizing honest people. They are drawn to politics as vultures flock to rotting meat — and they feed off the carcasses of vice.”
-- former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens
“We need to look infinitely harder at who we elect to any office in our land — at the office seeker’s character, at their morals, at their ethical record, their integrity, their honesty, their flaws, what they have said about women, and minorities, why they are seeking office in the first place, and only then consider the policies they espouse.”
John F. Kelly, former White House Chief of Staff
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Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, but probably apocryphal.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
Anatole France
