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

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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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

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.

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.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

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

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.

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.