The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.
Ambrose Bierce
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
Aristotle
Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U.S., to become progressive democratic republics.
Carlos Fuentes
My late mother moved back to her parents' homeland in the 1990s when Ukraine and Russia, along with the thirteen other former Soviet republics, became independent states. Drawing on her experience as a lawyer in Canada, she served as executive officer of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, an NGO she helped to found.
Chrystia Freeland
The fake republics are goners; the monarchies have a fighting chance. That's my conclusion after a short visit to the Middle East and discussions with officials and analysts there.
Elliott Abrams
The Arab monarchies, especially Jordan and Morocco, are more legitimate than the false republics, with their stolen elections, regime-dominated courts and rubber-stamp parliaments.
It's essential for the U.S. and Europe to prevent Putin from going farther and reversing the hard-won independence of former Soviet republics.
George Packer
Before the military coup in Chile, we had the idea that military coups happen in Banana Republics, somewhere in Central America. It would never happen in Chile. Chile was such a solid democracy. And when it happened, it had brutal characteristics.
Isabel Allende
The political power of the Country must fall eventually into the hands of certain great families as it always has done in other republics.
James L. Petigru
In Republics, the great danger is, that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority.
James Madison
Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.
Joseph Story
In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev stole the young poet Joseph Brodsky's girlfriend.
Keith Gessen
The U.S., together with trans-Atlantic allies, never recognized the occupation of the Baltic states by the Soviet Union. Moscow faced pressure or retaliation every time it tried to move toward official recognition, or at least acceptance, of its claim that the Baltic states were Soviet republics.
Kersti Kaljulaid
In democratic republics such as ours, citizens rely on public criticism of ideas and people to determine national policy.
Michael J. Knowles
Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.
Montesquieu
Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.
The breakup of the former Soviet Union has caused its grain output to plummet, but if the new republics recover economically, they could produce vast amounts of food.
Norman Borlaug
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
Plutarch
Banana republics are run on cronyism.
Ratan Tata
As in Athens, the right to participate was restricted to men, just as it was also in all later democracies and republics until the twentieth century.
Robert A. Dahl
There is no question but that the laws and principles which Solon laid down both foreshadowed and prepared the way for all republics of later ages, including our own.
The Soviet Union was designed for Muscovite rule, not for division into independent republics. Yet the latter is exactly what happened in 1991 - and the Kremlin has never accepted it.
Republics, like other forms of government, exist in history and can rise and fall.
Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
