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

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.

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

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.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

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.

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

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.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.