A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

Politics is the art of the possible.

Every country has the government it deserves.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.