You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

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

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

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.

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

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.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

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

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.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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