Catherine the Great

Power without a nation’s confidence is nothing.

A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.

Happiness and unhappiness are in the heart and spirit of each one of us: If you feel unhappy, then place yourself above that and act so that your happiness does not get to be dependent on anything.

I am one of the people who love the why of things.

One does not always do the best there is. One does the best one can. – Catherine the Great

All punishments by which the human body might be maimed are barbarbarism.

Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.

While mild social reforms have been introduced in the United States, others now conventional in Western Europe (e.g., national health insurance, minimal ‘worker participation’ in industry, etc.) have been effectively resisted here…

Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

I will not allow the selfless efforts of my husband and his friends to be abandoned. I will continue the struggle for a free and equal South Africa.

He who votes does not have power. He who counts the votes has power.

Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.

I believe I have mentioned that President Trump – well it’s his first presidential term and he’s gaining momentum, he’s building up his experience in this field and we’ve had a dialogue on this issue [North Korea]. He listens to what I’m saying, he listens to my arguments.

So there was basically the same kind of conflict in Peter as Yeltsin had with the Supreme Soviet [parliament]? Yes. But it is important to note that there wasn’t the same division between the law-enforcement agencies that there had been in 1991. The FSB11 leadership-Viktor Cherkesov was the head-announced their support for the mayor from the start. The FSB introduced a number of measures advocating the arrest of extremists who were plotting provocations, planning to blow things up, or trying to destabilize the situation. And that was the end of it.

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.

The only card [Hillary Clinton] has is the woman’s card. She’s got nothing else to offer and frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card, and the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.

Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don’t interfere as long as the policy you’ve decided upon is being carried out.

Once his wife goes to sleep it takes a minor nuclear explosion to wake her.

Everywhere the Europeans went, whether it was the Portuguese or the Spanish or the English or the Dutch, they fought with a level of violence which appalled the natives. They had never seen anything like it. That was true virtually over the entire world, with very few exceptions.

These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.

An IMF study that investigated the profits of American banks…found that they were almost entirely dependent on implicit public subsidies. There’s a kind of a guarantee – it’s not on paper, but it’s an implicit guarantee – that if they get into trouble they will be bailed out.