Politicians, Statesmen, Royalty

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton (1834-1902)

You will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.
John Quincy Adams

I didn't accept it. I received it.
Richard Allen, National Security Advisor to President Reagan, explaining the $1000 in cash and two watches he was given by two Japanese journalists after he helped arrange a private interview for them with First Lady Nancy Reagan.

The best audience is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk.
Alben W. Barkley, former Vice President

Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.
Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC

In politics stupidity is not a handicap.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bon-fire under her deck... I have no time for such nonsense.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), commenting on Fulton's Steamship

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Napoleon Bonaparte

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
Omar Bradley, General

I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children they just about throw up.
Barbara Bush, First lady, 1989

I've often thought that the process of aging could be slowed down if it had to go through Congress.
George Bush Sr.

The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.
George Bush Sr. (1924 - ), In a speech in 2002.

Go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.
Former president Jimmy Carter

If you're going through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill, Sir (1874-1965)

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.
Winston Churchill, Sir (1874-1965)

Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.
Winston Churchill, Sir (1874-1965)

We all are worms, but I do believe I am a glow worm.
Winston Churchill, Sir (1874-1965)

What do you take me for, an idiot?
Charles de Gaulle, General (1890-1970), when a journalist asked him if he was happy

Nurture your mind with great thoughts.
Benjamin Disraeli

The commander in chief (Bill Clinton) is jogging in San Francisco in his slit-up-the-sides, silk, girlie-girlie jogging pants showing us those beautiful white doughboy thighs of his.
Representative Bob Dornan (R, California)

I am the emperor, and I want dumplings.
Ferdinand I

Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.
Benjamin Franklin, from Poor Richard's Almanac

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.
Benjamin Franklin

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.
Benjamin Franklin

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

We must become the change we want to see.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi, "Non-Violence in Peace and War"

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
Mahatma Gandhi

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo.
Al Gore, U.S. Vice President

With incest you could get super-smart kids.
Rep. Carl Gunter (R-Louisiana)

I regret that I have but one life to give to my country.
Nathan Hale, American Patriot, final words, executed by the British, 1776

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!
Patrick Henry

The great masses of the people... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.
Adolf Hitler

About the time we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
Herbert Hoover

Never look down on anybody unless you're helping him up.
Jesse Jackson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson

Only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.
Lyndon B. Johnson

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: PRESIDENT CAN'T SWIM.
Lyndon B. Johnson

I guess this is the week I earn my pay.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), during the Cuban missile crisis

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
Robert F. Kennedy

I think what the president needs to do is, frankly, put his big boy pants on. He needs to acknowledge the fact that he lost and he needs to congratulate the winner just as Jimmy Carter did, just as George H.W. Bush did and, frankly, just as Al Gore did and stop this and let us move forward as a country.
Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, 2020, about President Trump

I cannot tell you how grateful I am - I am filled with humidity.
Texas Speaker of the House Gib Lewis

This is unparalyzed in the state's history.
Texas Speaker of the House Gib Lewis

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.
Sir John Lubbock (English banker, politician, naturalist and archaeologist)

False, lying, cowardly, nauseous puppy. The greatest ass, liar, and beast in the world.
King George III, on his eldest son, Prince Frederick

My father was frightened of his mother. I was frightened of my father. And I am damned well going to see that my children are frightened of me.
King George V

To make women learned and foxes tame has the same defect - to make them more cunning.
King James I

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

Next week there can't be any crisis. My schedule is already full.
Henry Kissinger (Born 1923)

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers.
Nikita Khruschev

We are not retreating - we are advancing in another Direction.
Douglas MacArthur, General (1880-1964)

I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.
Dudley Field Malone (lawyer)

I never lose. I either win or learn.
Nelson Mandela

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
Nelson Mandela (1918 - ), 'A Long Walk to Freedom'

Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart, don't know how to laugh either.
Golda Meir (1898-1978)

Don't be so humble, you're not that great.
Golda Meir (1898-1978)

If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.
Mother Teresa

I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.
Mother Teresa

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
Mother Teresa

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in an ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.
Mother Teresa

When the president does it, that's means it is not illegal.
Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), Former U.S. President

We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
Barack Obama

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
George S. Patton, General (1885-1945)

Maybe there are 5,000, maybe 10,000 Nazi bastards in their concrete foxholes before the Third Army. Now if Ike stops holding Monty's hand and gives me the supplies, I'll go through the Siegfried Line like shit through a goose.
George S. Patton, General (1885-1945)

Behind every successful man there stands a surprised woman.
Maryon Pearson (wife of Lester Bowles Pearson, the 14th Prime Minister of Canada)

I'm one of those stupid bums who went to university. Well, I think it's helped me.
Prince Charles

I'm one of those stupid bums who never went to university, and it hasn't done me any harm.
Prince Philip

Which are the monkeys?
Prince Philip, when confronted by apes and journalists in Gibraltar

You have to decide at the end of the day if you can live with yourself.
Princess Anne

Handsome I cannot think him, with that painfully small and narrow head, whose immense features, and total want of a chin. I never can or shall look at him without a shudder.
Queen Victoria, on her son, the future King Edward VII

She ought to get a good whipping.
Queen Victoria, about a suffragette

You can kill a thousand; you can bring an end to life; you cannot kill an idea.
Shimon Peres, Former Israeli Prime Minister, on the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin

I don’t intend for this to take on a political tone. I’m just here for the drugs.
Nancy Reagan, former First Lady of the United States

You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.
Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004), quoted in Observer, March 29 1981

'The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'
Ronald Reagan

If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 - 1962), My Day

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945), Pan American Day address, April 15, 1939

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizen in a Republic", April 23, 1910

I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.
Theodore Roosevelt, “THE STRENUOUS LIFE” (10 April 1899)

When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer “present” or “not guilty.”
Theodore Roosevelt

Lying is forbidden in Iraq. President Saddam Hussein will tolerate nothing but truthfulness as he is a man of great honor and integrity. Everyone is encouraged to speak freely of the truths evidenced in their eyes and hearts.
Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraqi Minister of Information

I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough.
Claire Sargent, Arizona senatorial candidate

There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.
Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
Margaret Thatcher

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
Harry S. Truman

If an American is hit on the head by a ball at the ballpark, he sues. If a Japanese person is hit on the head, he says, 'It's my honor. It's my fault.'
Koji Yanase, of the Japan federation of Bar Associations, on why there are half as many lawyers in his country as in the Washington area