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

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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

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.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.