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

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

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.

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.

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.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

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

Politics is the art of the possible.