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 of 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 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 is 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 / Paulo 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.