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

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.

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

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

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

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

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

I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

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