Envy is the basis of democracy.

Politics is the art of the possible.

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

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.