I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

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.

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

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

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.

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

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

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

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

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.