The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

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.

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

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

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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

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.

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

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.

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.