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

Every country has the government it deserves.

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

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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