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.

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

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

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

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

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

Politics is the art of the possible.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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.

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

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

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