What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.