It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

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.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

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

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.