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

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 first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

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

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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

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

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

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.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

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.