Politics is the art of the possible.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

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

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

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.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

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.

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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

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