On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.

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

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

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

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

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.

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.

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

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

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

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