Political Cryptograms
Type your best guess for each letter. Hint letters are struck in brass; your guesses propagate to every matching code letter. Solve it all and your score appears.
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Political Cryptograms
Statesmen, cynics, and people who were right too early.
Ciphers and politics have always kept company. Every government the Czar has ever admired ran on intercepted mail. This file holds quotes from statesmen, dissidents, satirists and the occasional tyrant - selected for how they read, not for whom they flatter.
Political quotations skew long and formal, which cuts both ways. Long texts give you a rich letter-frequency profile, so counting pays off handsomely here. But the vocabulary is heavier - government, liberty, republic - so the short-word tricks that crack a humor puzzle will only get you started.
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Questions for the Czar
Are the political cryptograms partisan?
No. Quotes are chosen from across the spectrum and across several centuries, on the basis of whether they make an interesting puzzle. You will decode people you agree with and people you do not.
Why are political quotes harder to decode?
They tend to be longer and more formal, with heavier vocabulary. The compensation is that longer text makes letter-frequency analysis far more reliable - counting which cipher letter appears most often is genuinely useful here in a way it is not on a six-word quote.