The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

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.

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.

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

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

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

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

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.

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

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

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

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.