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

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

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.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

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