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.

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.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

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

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

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

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

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

Politics is the art of the possible.

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

Every country has the government it deserves.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.