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

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

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

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

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.

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

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

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

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.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

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.

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.