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

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

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 say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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