You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.

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

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.”

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

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

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.

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

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

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

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.