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 U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

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

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

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

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.

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

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

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

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.

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.