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

I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

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.

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

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

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

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

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

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

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.