Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

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.

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

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

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

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.