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

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

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

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

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

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.

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

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

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

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.

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.