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

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

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.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

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

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

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