I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Every country has the government it deserves.

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.

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

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

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

Politics is the art of the possible.

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

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