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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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

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

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.

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

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

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.

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

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

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