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

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!