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

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

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.

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

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

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

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

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

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

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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.