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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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.

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.

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

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