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

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

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

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

Every country has the government it deserves.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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

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.

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.