I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

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

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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

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.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.