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.

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

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

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

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

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.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

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.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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.