Pithy quotations

From a collection of several dozen assembled at Harvard Magazine:

We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. —Louis D. Brandeis

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer. —Dean Acheson

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. —Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. —George Santayana

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. —Henry James

A democracy—that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people. —Theodore Parker, 1836

All the security around the American president is just to make sure the man who shoots him gets caught. —Norman Mailer