The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

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

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

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

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

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

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

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.

I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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