You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

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

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

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.

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.

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.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

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

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.