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

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

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

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

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

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

Every country has the government it deserves.

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.

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

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

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.

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.

Politics is the art of the possible.