Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

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

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

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.

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

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

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

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.

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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