All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

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.

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

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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.

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

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

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

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

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.