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.

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.

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

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

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

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

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.

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.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

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

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.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.