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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

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

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.

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