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

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

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.

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

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

Politics is the art of the possible.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

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.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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.