Every country has the government it deserves.

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

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

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

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

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

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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

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