The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

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

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.

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

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

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

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

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

Politics is the art of the possible.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

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.