Quotes Library

May 10, 2025

I respect fidelity to colleagues even though they are fit for the hangman.

Harold Laski (1893-1950), British Labour politician and academic, letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 4 December 1926, Jay p.218

Do you? Or don’t you?

You must! In governments that move by majority vote, every colleague is needed by you, and you by them, to achieve any legislative goal. Ignore everything else unless your fidelity puts you at genuine risk of being hanged.


More Quotes

April 23, 2025
If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
September 13, 2025
[Of the fictional British cabinet minister Jim Hacker] Years of political training and experience had taught him to use twenty words where one would do
July 31, 2025
Conspiracies cannot be hatched without the complicity of others, and for that reason are extremely dangerous.
Page 57 of 123