Envy is the basis of democracy.

Politics is the art of the possible.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.