Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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.

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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

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.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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

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.

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.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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