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.

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

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

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.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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

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

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