The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

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

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

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

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

Politics is the art of the possible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

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