19th-century Politician Quotes

Adolf Hitler

Winston Churchill

Mahatma Gandhi

Abraham Lincoln

Vladimir Lenin

Joseph Stalin

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Men and women are like right and left hands; it doesn't make sense not to use both.

Jeanette Rankin

Most of man's problems upon this planet, in the long history of the race, have been met and solved either partially or as a whole by experiment based on common sense and carried out with courage.

Frances Perkins

I talk. It is necessary. Action puts the passions to work, but it is speech that arouses them.

Charles de Gaulle

It is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of a nation.

John Russell, 1st Earl Russell

The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

Theodore Roosevelt

One of the strongest characteristics of genius is—the power of lighting its own fire.

As to your kind wishes for myself, allow me to say I can not enter the ring on the money basis--first, because, in the main, it iswrong; and secondly, I have not, and can not get, the money. I say, in the main, the use of money is wrong; but for certain objects, in a political contest, the use of some, is both right, and indispensable.

Abraham Lincoln

Peace, like war, can succeed only where there is a will to enforce it, and where there is available power to enforce it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be swallowed.

Konrad Adenauer

Science is a tool by which men will build their future. The future will depend on man's use of his tool.

Eleanor Roosevelt

As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government … too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think that it will give some comfort to the enemy to know that there is such criticism. If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur.

It is difficult for me to imagine what personal liberty is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.

In Great Britain, governments often change their policies without changing their men. In France, they usually change their men without changing their policy.

Winston Churchill

The revolutionary proletariat will succeed making religion a really private affair, so far as the state is concerned. And in this political system, cleansed of medieval mildew, the proletariat will wage a broad and open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true source of the religious humbugging of mankind.

It is therefore not true that the mere existence of the Soviet Union is capable of assuring the victory of the revolution in other countries.

Since we are not in the League of Nations in any case, we do not devote our attention to reflecting on its internal reforms.

At present, financial crises occur, chiefly because the paper currency is redeemable in gold only.

John Buchanan Robinson

No amount of study or learning will make a man a leader unless he has the natural qualities of one.

Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell

I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles; my constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures.

William M. Tweed

By common consent of the nations, gold and silver are the only true measure of value. They are the necessary regulators of trade. I have myself no more doubt that these metals were prepared by the Almighty for this very purpose, than I have that iron and coal were prepared for the purposes in which they are being used.

I am bored; the great things are done. The German Reich is made.

Otto von Bismarck

All societies of men must be governed in some way or other. The less they may have of stringent State Government, the more they must have of individual self-government. The less they rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely on private moral restraint. Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the Word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible, or by the bayonet. It may do for other countries and other governments to talk about the State supporting religion. Here, under our own free institutions, it is Religion which must support the State.

Robert Charles Winthrop

For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the nation is considerable.

Charles Erwin Wilson

We may smile at these matters, but they are melancholy illustrations.

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There's far less competition.