I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

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

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.

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

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

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

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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

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

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

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