Alexis de Tocqueville

I hold it to be… a detestable maxim that, politically speaking, the people have a right to do anything.

To lay down… limits to the action of the government; to confer certain rights on private persons, and to secure to them the undisputed enjoyment of those rights… [are] the main objects.

Popularity may be united with hostility to the rights of the people, and the secret slave of tyranny may be the professed lover of freedom.

No sooner does a government attempt to go beyond its political sphere… than it exercises… insupportable tyranny.

When…the people are invested with the supreme authority…they discover a multitude of wants… to satisfy these exigencies recourse must be had to the coffers of the state.

True friends of liberty… ought constantly to be on the alert to prevent the power of government from lightly sacrificing the private rights of individuals to the general execution of its designs. At such times no citizen is so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed; no private rights are so unimportant that they can be surrendered with impunity to the caprices of a government… [because] men accustom themselves to sacrifice private interest without scruple and to trample on the rights of individuals in order more speedily to accomplish any public purpose.

For 18 years I have resisted talking about current events. I am not going to start now.

Europeans are dying out. Don’t you understand that? And same-sex marriages don’t produce children. Do you want to survive by drawing migrants? But society cannot adapt so many migrants.

Once wide coercive powers are given to government agencies…such powers cannot be effectively controlled.

Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was ‘the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.’

Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called ‘moderate Republicans’. The ‘political revolution’ that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower.

Firstly, the use of our armed forces in the battlefield is a unique experience, a unique tool by which to improve our armed forces. No amount of military exercise could compare with the use of force in combat conditions.

Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely and who rely on you

Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

In Nixon’s administration, you get the consumer safety legislation (CPSC), safety and health regulations in the workplace (OSHA) and the EPA – the Environmental Protection Agency. Business didn’t like it, of course – they didn’t like the higher taxes, didn’t like the regulation.

Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners as yet.

One day we took each other by the hand and went for a walk in the evening. And we walked like that for our whole life.

Top [U.S.] planners recognized that if we can control Middle East oil we can control the world. If you have your hand on the spigot you can control what other people do, whether we use it or not.

We don’t say that three-year-olds are lying if they say they saw a dragon outside, or an actor in a play. It’s also not clear that it’s tactically useful to tot up the random falsehoods that pepper [Trump’s] tweets and orations.

We are not abandoning our convictions, our philosophy or traditions, nor do we urge anyone to abandon theirs.

KGB, collapsed. Of course it was incredibly difficult to go through this. After all, most of my life had been devoted to work in the agencies. But I had made my choice.