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.

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

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.

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

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.

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

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

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

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

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

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

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

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