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.

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.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

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

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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