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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

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