Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

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

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

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.