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

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Every country has the government it deserves.

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.