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

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

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

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.

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.

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

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

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

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

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

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.