Alexis de Tocqueville

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.

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.

Defending rights against the encroachments of the government saves the common liberties of the country.

The democratic tendency… leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state and to circumscribe the rights of private persons… often sacrificed without regret and almost always violated without remorse… men become less and less attached to private rights just when it is most necessary to retain and defend what little remains of them.

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.

Of course we as Labour Party members must all be free to criticise and oppose injustice and abuse wherever we find it. But as today’s Report recommends, can we please leave Hitler and Nazi metaphors alone (especially in the context of Israel). Why? Because the Shoah is still in people’s family experience.

There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm.

Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing effect – the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on – these are mostly developments of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their roots might be in the activism of the ‘60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded.

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I’m beginning to believe it.

The introduction, for example, of restrictive tariffs on steel, on aluminum, not only for Europe but also for Canada and Mexico, in essence these are also sanctions… They are related to the pragmatic national interests of the United States.

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.

The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It’s very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can’t fight the world alone.

America’s greatest strength has always been its hopeful vision of human progress.

I will continue – as Labour Leader – to pursue the causes of peace and justice in Israel-Palestine, the wider Middle East and all over the world. But those who claim to do so with hateful or inflammatory language do no service to anyone, especially dispossessed and oppressed people in need of better advocacy.

Now if you can’t pay back a loan to me, I don’t say that your neighbors have to pay it back. But that’s what the IMF says. The IMF says the people of the country have to pay back the debt which they had nothing to do with, it was usually given to dictators, or rich elites…

I’m a history buff, and I know that big changes take time. But I also know that, setting politics aside, usually things are never as good as you think they are or as bad as you think they are. And that has served me well temperamentally.

It’s not radical Islam that worries the US – it’s independence

I don’t mind what Congress does, as long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.