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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

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.

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.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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

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

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

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