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.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

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

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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

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.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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.

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.

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

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

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.