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

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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

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

Every country has the government it deserves.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

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