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

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.

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

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

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.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

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

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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

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

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

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

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