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

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

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

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

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.

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

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

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

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

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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.