Politics is the art of the possible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

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

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

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

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.