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.

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

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

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

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

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