Famous quotes containing the words political, repression, peoples, republic, china, civil and/or liberties:
“The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“Only that which points the human spirit beyond its own limitations into what is universally human gives the individual strength superior to his own. Only in suprahuman demands which can hardly be fulfilled do human beings and peoples feel their true and sacred measure.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight.”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
“Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction.... It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“[Rutherford B. Hayes] was a patriotic citizen, a lover of the flag and of our free institutions, an industrious and conscientious civil officer, a soldier of dauntless courage, a loyal comrade and friend, a sympathetic and helpful neighbor, and the honored head of a happy Christian home. He has steadily grown in the public esteem, and the impartial historian will not fail to recognize the conscientiousness, the manliness, and the courage that so strongly characterized his whole public career.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“If the union of these States, and the liberties of this people, shall be lost, it is but little to any one man of fifty-two years of age, but a great deal to the thirty millions of people who inhabit these United States, and to their posterity in all coming time.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)