You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

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.

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

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

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

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

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”