“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

The Marshall Plan Speech (1947)
Context: An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part. With foresight, and a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country, the difficulties I have outlined can and will be overcome.... to my mind, it is of vast importance that our people reach some general understanding of what the complications really are, rather than react from a passion or a prejudice or an emotion of the moment. As I said more formally a moment ago, we are remote from the scene of these troubles. It is virtually impossible at this distance merely by reading, or listening, or even seeing photographs or motion pictures, to grasp at all the real significance of the situation. And yet the whole world of the future hangs on a proper judgment.

Something About a Soldier (1940)

Source: Law and Authority (1886), I
Context: In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. … In short, a law everywhere and for everything! A law about fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law to put a stop to all the vices and all the evils which result from human indolence and cowardice.
We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferrule of a law, which regulates every event in life — our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship — that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves. Our society seems no longer able to understand that it is possible to exist otherwise than under the reign of law, elaborated by a representative government and administered by a handful of rulers. And even when it has gone so far as to emancipate itself from the thralldom, its first care has been to reconstitute it immediately. "The Year I of Liberty" has never lasted more than a day, for after proclaiming it men put themselves the very next morning under the yoke of law and authority.

Wafa Sultan, cited in: N. C. Munson, Noel Carroll. If You Can Keep It, Allen-Ayers Books, 2010, p. 215

Maxim 383
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

The comfortable generosity of this offer puzzled Kearney, so he decided to ignore it. It seemed meaningless anyway.
Source: Light (2002), Chapter 31 “I’ve Been Here” (p. 390)

Napoléon III, Des Idées napoléoniennes, edited by Henri Colburn, London (1839), chapter 3, p. 39: En politique il faut guérir les maux, jamais les venger.
Translated by James A. Dorr, in: Napoleonic Ideas, Appleton & Co, New York (1859), p. 41