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.

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.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

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

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

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