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.