Envy is the basis of democracy.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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

Every country has the government it deserves.

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

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

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 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.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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

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