Frederick the Great Quotes
Though I may not be a king in my future life, so much the better: I shall nevertheless live an active life and, on top of it, earn less ingratitude.
Frederick II. Letter to Voltaire, 27 November 1773. Oeuvres de Frédéric le Grand, edited by J.D.E. Preuss, vol. 23, Imprimerie Royale, 1853, p. 297.
Taft contrasted Hughes with Theodore Roosevelt.
When effective leaders do great things for their society which benefits as a result, there are usually some ingrates who will complain about the ruler or leader. When President William Clinton created a balanced budget and at the same time created more jobs than any other President in history, all with excellent growth rates and very low inflation, there were still those who complained about Clinton. The very successful rulers or politicians tend to produce what Voltaire called “ingrates”, but the leader’s behavior that produced the ingrate was noble. See Alexander the Great {632232} who seems to have first uttered this principle.
Frederick II was a Prussian king and military leader who ruled the Kingdom of Prussia from 1740 until 1786, reigning longer than any other Hohenzollern king. His most significant accomplishments during his reign included his reorganization of Prussian armies, his military successes in the Silesian wars and the Partitions of Poland, and his patronage of the arts and the Enlightenment. Frederick was the last Hohenzollern monarch titled King in Prussia and declared himself King of Prussia after annexing strategic parts of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772. Prussia greatly increased its territories and became a leading military power in Europe under his rule. He became known as Frederick the Great (German: Friedrich der Große) and was nicknamed "The Old Fritz" (German: "Der Alte Fritz") by the Prussian people and eventually the rest of Germany.
