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.

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

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

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.

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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

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

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

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.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

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.