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

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.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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.

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 spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

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

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

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

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.