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.

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

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

Politics is the art of the possible.

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.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

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.

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

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

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

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

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.