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

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

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 riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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.

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

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

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

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

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.