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.

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

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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

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

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

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

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.

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

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

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