I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

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

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

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

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

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.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

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

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

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

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

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