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.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

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.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.