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

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

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.

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

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

Every country has the government it deserves.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

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

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

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.

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.

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.