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.

I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

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

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

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

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.

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

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