There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

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

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 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.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

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.

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

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

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

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

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

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.