Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

Every country has the government it deserves.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

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

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.