Political Quotes (of the Modern Era)

Here are some interesting quotes:

"To initiate a war of aggression... is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."-- Nuremberg Tribunal

"The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the U.N. charter."-- U.N. Chief Kofi Annan - September 2004 [Source BBC]

"When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law." Frederic Bastiat (1801~1850) French economist, statesman, and author [Source: "The Law," by Frederic Bastiat, 1850]

"Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave."-- Frederick Douglass

"It is part of the moral tragedy with which we are dealing that words like 'democracy,' 'freedom', 'rights', 'justice', which have so often inspired heroism and have led men to give their lives for things which make life worthwhile, can also become a trap, the means of destroying the very things men desire to uphold."-- Sir Norman Angell (1874~1967), 1956.

"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 -- (letter to Col. William F. Elkins) [Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, N.Y.)]

"They (corporations) cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls."-- Lord Edward Coke

"criminal, n. A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."-- Howard Scott

"Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Your wealth has been stripped of you by unjust men... The people of Baghdad shall flourish under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws." (General F.S. Maude, commander of British forces in Iraq, 1917)

"Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion. Do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights!" (Napoleon Bonaparte, 1798)

"If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."-- Henry David Thoreau, "On the Duty of Civil Disobediance," 1849

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."-- James Bovard, 1994 [Source: "Lost Rights. The Destruction of American Liberty" (St. Martin's Press: New York, 1994), p. 333]

"The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace."-- James Madison

"A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts."-- James Anthony Froude (1818~1894), Author and historian [Source: "Short Studies on Great Subjects"]

"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells."-- John Flynn, 1944

"Patriotism is a religion, the egg from which wars are hatched."-- Guy de Maupassant

"Seas of blood have been shed for the sake of patriotism. One would expect the harm and irrationality of patriotism to be self- evident to everyone. But the surprising fact is that cultured and learned [socially conditioned and indoctrinated] people not only do not notice the harm and stupidity of patriotism, they resist every unveiling of it with the greatest obstinacy and passion (with no rational grounds), and continue to praise it as beneficent and elevating."-- Leo Tolstoy

"Blind patriotism has been kept intact by rewriting history to provide people with moral consolation and a psychological basis for denial."-- William H. Boyer

"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' -- 'one against all' -- and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man."-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins Of Totalitarianism" p.227