I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

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.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

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

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.