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.

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.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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 country has the government it deserves.

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

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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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.

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