He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

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

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

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

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

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

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

Politics is the art of the possible.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

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.

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.