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

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

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

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

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

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.

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

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

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