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

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

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.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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

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.

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

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.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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

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