The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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.

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

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.