The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

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.

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.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

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.

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.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

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