A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

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.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

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.

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

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.