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.

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

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

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

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.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

Politics is the art of the possible.

Every country has the government it deserves.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

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

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.

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