The Politics Book

Ancient political thought, 800 BCE-30 CE : If your desire is for good, the people will be good: Confucius 
 The art of war is of vital importance to the state: Sun Tzu 
 Plans for the country are only to be shared with the learned: Mozi 
 Until philosophers are kings, cities will never have rest from their evils: Plato 
 Man is by nature a political animal: Aristotle 
 A single wheel does not move: Chanakya 
 If evil ministers enjoy safety and profit, this is the beginning of downfall: Han Fei Tzu 
 The government is bandied about like a ball: Cicero --
Medieval politics, 30 CE-1515 CE : If justice be taken away, what are governments but great bands of robbers?: Augustine of Hippo 
 Fighting has been enjoined upon you while it is hateful to you: Muhammad 
 The people refuse the rule of virtuous men: Al-farabi 
 No free man shall be imprisoned, except by the law of the land: Barons of King John 
 For war to be just, there is required a just cause: Thomas Aquinas 
 To live politically means living in accordance with good laws: Giles of Rome 
 The Church should devote itself to imitating Christ and give up its secular power: Marsilius Padua 
 Government prevents injustice, other than such as it commits itself: Ibn Khaldun 
 A prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honor his word: Niccolò Machiavelli --
Rationality and enlightenment, 1515-1770 : In the beginning everything was common to all? Francisco de Vitoria 
 Sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth: Jean Bodin 
 The natural law is the foundation of human law: Francisco Suárez 
 Politics is the art of associating men: Johannes Althusius 
 Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves: Hugo Grotius 
 The condition of man is a condition of war: Thomas Hobbes 
 The end of law is to preserve and enlarge freedom: John Locke 
 When legislative and executive powers are united in the same body, there can be no liberty: Montesquieu 
 Independent entrepreneurs make good citizens: Benjamin Franklin --
Revolutionary thoughts, 1770-1848 : to renounce liberty is to renounce being a man: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 
 No generally valid principle of legislation can be based on happiness: Immanuel Kant 
 The passions of individuals should be subjected: Edmund Burke 
 Rights of dependent on property are the most precarious: Thomas Paine 
 All men are created equal: Thomas Jefferson 
 Each nationality contains its center of happiness within itself: Johann Gottfried Herder 
 Government has but a choice of evils: Jeremy Bentham 
 The people have a right to keep and bear arms: James Madison 
 The most respectable women are the most oppressed: Mary Wollstonecraft 
 The slave feels self-existence to be something external: Georg Hegel 
 War is the continuation of Politik by other means: Carl von Clausewitz 
 Abolition and the union cannot coexist: John C. Calhoun 
 A state too extensive in itself ultimately falls into decay: Simón Bolívar 
 An educated and wise government recognizes the developmental needs of its society: José María Luis Mora 
 The tendency to attack "the family" is a symptom of social chaos: Auguste Comte --
The rise of the masses, 1848-1910 : Socialism is a new system of serfdom: Alexis de Tocqueville 
 Say not I, but we: Giuseppe Mazzini 
 That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time: John Stuart Mill 
 No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent: Abraham Lincoln 
 Property is theft: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 
 The privileged man is a man depraved in intellect and heart: Mikhail Bakunin 
 That government is best which governs not at all: Henry David Thoreau 
 Communism is the riddle of history solved: Karl Marx 
 The men who proclaimed the republic became the assassins of freedom: Alexander Herzen 
 We must look for a central axis for our nation: Ito Hirobumi 
 The will to power: Friedrich Nietzsche 
 It is the myth that is alone important: Georges Sorel 
 We have to take working men as they are: Eduard Bernstein 
 The disdain of our formidable neighbor is the greatest danger for Latin America: José Martí 
 It necessary to dare in order to succeed: Peter Kropotkin 
 Either women are to be killed, or women are to have the vote: Emmeline Pankhurst 
 It is ridiculous to deny the existence of a Jewish nation: Theodor Herzl 
 Nothing will avail to save a nation whose workers have decayed: Beatrice Webb 
 Protective legislation in America is shamefully inadequate: Jane Addams 
 Land to the tillers!: Sun Yat-Sen 
 The individual is a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism: Max Weber. The clash of ideologies, 1910-1945 : Nonviolence is the first article of my faith: Mahatma Gandhi
 Politics begin where the masses are: Vladimir Lenin 
 The mass strike results from social conditions with historical inevitability: Rosa Luxemburg 
 An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last: Winston Churchill 
 The Fascist conception of the state is all-embracing: Giovanni Gentile 
 The wealthy farmers must be deprived of the sources of their existence: Joseph Stalin 
 If the end justifies the means, what justifies the end?: Leon Trotsky 
 We will unite Mexicans by giving guarantees to the peasant and the businessman: Emiliano Zapata 
 War is a racket: Smedley D. Butler 
 Sovereignty is not given, it is taken: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 
 Europe has been left without a moral code: José Ortega y Gasset 
 We are 400 million people asking for liberty: Marcus Garvey 
 India cannot really be free unless separated from the British Empire: Manabendra Nath Roy 
 Sovereign is he who decides on the exception: Carl Schmitt 
 Communism is as bad as imperialism: Jomo Kenyatta 
 The state must be conceived of as an "educator": Antonio Gramsci 
 Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun: Mao Zedong --
Postwar politics, 1945-present : The chief evil is unlimited government: Friedrich Hayek 
 Parliamentary government and rationalist politics do not belong to the same system: Michael Oakeshott 
 The objective of the Islamic jihad is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system: Abul Ala Maududi 
 There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men: Ayn Rand 
 Every known and established fact can be denied: Hannah Arendt 
 What is a woman?: Simone de Beauvoir 
 No natural object is solely a resource: Arne Naess 
 We are not anti-white, we are against white supremacy: Nelson Mandela 
 Only the weak-minded believe that politics is a place of collaboration: Gianfranco Miglio 
 During the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed tend to become oppressors: Paul Freire 
 Justice is the first virtue of social institutions: John Rawls 
 Colonialism is violence in its natural state: Frantz Fanon 
 The ballot or the bullet: Malcolm X 
 We need to "cut off the king's head" : Michel Foucault 
 Liberators do not exist
 the people liberate themselves: Che Guevara 
 Everybody has to make sure that the rich folks are happy: Noam Chomsky 
 Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance: Martin Luther King 
 Perestroika unites socialism with democracy: Mikhail Gorbachev 
 The intellectuals erroneously fought Islam: Ali Shariati 
 The hellishness of war drives us to break with every restraint: Michael Walzer 
 No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified: Robert Nozick 
 No Islamic law says violate women's rights: Shirin Ebadi 
 Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation: Robert Pape --
Glossary.