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"Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a constant submission to it."
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"Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us."
"I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world."
"For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
"No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision."
"Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles."
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
"For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery."
"The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop."
"Government is a ruling structured thuggery."
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."
Explore more quotes by Alexander Herzen
"If nations always moved from one set of furnished rooms to another - and always into a better set - things might be easier, but the trouble is that there is no one to prepare the new rooms. The future is worse than the ocean - there is nothing there."
"Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it."
"You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas."
"Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others."
"Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men."
"What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!"
"Would it be possible to stand still on one spot more majestically - while simulating a triumphant march forward - than it is done by the two English Houses of Parliament?"
"Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood."
"We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation."
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