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

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

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

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

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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