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

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

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

Every country has the government it deserves.

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.

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

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

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

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

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

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

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.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.